Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum: Doctors, Patients, and Practices (Mental Health in Historical Perspective)
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Author: Jennifer Wallis
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Paperback:
ISBN 10: 3319859811
ISBN 13: 978-3319859811
Hardcover:
ISBN 10: 3319567136
ISBN 13: 978-3319567136
This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.
This book explores how the body was investigated in the late nineteenth-century asylum in Britain. As more and more Victorian asylum doctors looked to the bodily fabric to reveal the ‘truth’ of mental disease, a whole host of techniques and technologies were brought to bear upon the patient's body. These practices encompassed the clinical and the pathological, from testing the patient's reflexes to dissecting the brain.
Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum takes a unique approach to the topic, conducting a chapter-by-chapter dissection of the body. It considers how asylum doctors viewed and investigated the skin, muscles, bones, brain, and bodily fluids. The book demonstrates the importance of the body in nineteenth-century psychiatry as well as how the asylum functioned as a site of research, and will be of value to historians of psychiatry, the body, and scientific practice.
Review
“Jennifer Wallis’s Investigating Body in the Victorian Asylum: Doctors, Patients, and Practices, part of the Mental Health in Historical Perspective series sets to demonstrate how asylum doctors sought to locate mental illness on the body. … Overall, Wallis’s work provides a fresh, important, and much-needed contribution to the history of psychiatry, the body, and medicine more broadly.” (Lynsey Cullen, H-Net Reviews Humanities and Social Sciences, networks.h-net.org, August, 2018)
“Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum provides a meticulously researched and thoroughly readable – for all – social history of an important development in the mental sciences in the nineteenth century, centring it around the evolving practices of post-mortem examinations. I particularly like the way in which Wallis writes herself, her research process and her thinking into the book.” (Louise Hide, HHS History of The Human Sciences, histhum.com, August, 2018)
“This book is a valuable contribution to a number of overlapping fields; historians of psychiatry and of science, historical geographers and medical humanists will find inspiration in the way this work delves into a dimension of asylumdom underexplored within the literature. … an indispensable resource for historians of science. … this work will engage interested scholars at various stages of academia, from undergraduate students and postgraduate researchers to experienced course convenors.” (Sarah Phelan, Journal of Historical Geography, Iss. 1-2, 2018)
Review
“A highly original and stimulating approach to the history of psychiatry. It is likely to be added to a whole range of reading lists, including the histories of medicine, psychiatry and the body. I will certainly be adding it to mine.” (Gayle Davis, Senior Lecturer in the History of Medicine, University of Edinburgh, UK)
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