The Lunacy Commissioners and the East London Guardians, 1845-1867.

Bureaucracy and mental illness: the commissioners in lunacy 1845-90.

BY THE early nineteenth century the dynamics of economic growth, urban expansion, and demographic change had produced both new social problems and new dimensions of traditional problems. Changes in cultural and medical responses to insanity were one outcome, and there emerged a psychiatry based mainly on the experiences of alienists working within an asylum system which, after slow growth in th...

Provision for pauper lunatics 1834-1871.

IN England attention given to the problem of the insane was reluctant and spasmodic, and scandals of the eighteenth century were left to flourish almost unchecked until 1827, when a prominent parliamentary Committee of Inquiry revealed the disgusting and cruel state of affairs.2 As a result of subsequent agitation two Acts were passed in 1828, one to regulate the care and treatment of the insan...

Lunacy, Law, and Conscience, 1744-1845

The Present State of Lunacy in England and Wales

The eleventh very able Report recently issued by the Commissioners of Lunacy, presents great variety of interesting and valuable information on the present state and statistics of insanity throughout England and Wales; and cannot fail of being perused with the greatest interest by the psychologist especially, the philanthropist, political economist, and by our readers generally. This lleport br...

A 'Scottish Poor Law of Lunacy'? Poor Law, Lunacy Law and Scotland's parochial asylums.

Scotland's parochial asylums are unfamiliar institutional spaces. Representing the concrete manifestation of the collision between two spheres of legislation, the Poor Law and the Lunacy Law, six such asylums were constructed in the latter half of the nineteenth century. These sites expressed the enduring mandate of the Scottish Poor Law 1845 over the domain of 'madness'. They were institutions...