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2016 ; 60
(1
): 37-53
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No "Sane" Person Would Have Any Idea : Patients Involvement in Late
Nineteenth-century British Asylum Psychiatry
#MMPMID26651187
Chaney S
Med Hist
2016[Jan]; 60
(1
): 37-53
PMID26651187
show ga
In his 1895 textbook, Mental Physiology, Bethlem Royal Hospital physician Theo
Hyslop acknowledged the assistance of three fellow hospital residents. One was a
junior colleague. The other two were both patients: Walter Abraham Haigh and
Henry Francis Harding. Haigh was also thanked in former superintendent George
Savage's book Insanity and Allied Neuroses (1884). In neither instance were the
patients identified as such. This begs the question: what role did Haigh and
Harding play in asylum theory and practice? And how did these two men interpret
their experiences, both within and outside the asylum? By focusing on Haigh and
Harding's unusual status, this paper argues that the notion of nineteenth-century
'asylum patient' needs to be investigated by paying close attention to specific
national and institutional circumstances. Exploring Haigh and Harding's active
engagement with their physicians provides insight into this lesser-known aspect
of psychiatry's history. Their experience suggests that, in some instances,
representations of madness at that period were the product of a two-way process
of negotiation between alienist and patient. Patients, in other words, were not
always mere victims of 'psychiatric power'; they participated in the construction
and circulation of medical notions by serving as active intermediaries between
medical and lay perceptions of madness.