The politics and ideology of non-restraint: the case of the Hanwell Asylum.

The non-restraint movement, which aimed at the total abolition of physical or mechanical restraint, was one of the most conspicuous elements of Victorian psychiatry, and its inception in the late 1830s and early 1840s has been studied in detail. Alexander Walk in his article on the Lincoln General Asylum under Edward Parker Charlesworth and Robert Gardiner Hill has uncovered what went on at the birthplace of the movement, and Hunter and Macalpine give a full account of John Conolly's introduction of nonrestraint at the Middlesex County Asylum at Hanwell.1 Although these works have thrown valuable light on the struggle at the beginning of the movement, they are too much informed by the opinions of the pioneers themselves and their Victorian followers. Walk and Hunter and Macalpine have uncritically adopted the alienists' view of their