THE COMMISSIONERS IN LUNACY.

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...

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

The social history of insanity has proved a seductive paradigm for students of the management of the dependent poor in nineteenth-century England. Largely through Andrew Scull's work, the insane have been perceived as "casualties" of class and gender power relations during the transformation from paternalistic laissez-faire rural economy into an industrialized capitalist state.' While the Eliza...

“They're in the Trade... of Lunacy/They `cannot interfere'—they say”: the Scottish Lunacy Commissioners and lunacy reform in nineteenth-century Scotland

time. Modern film and contemporary cinema are doubtlessly permeated with Freud's discontented daughters; Bronfen would have strengthened her case by explaining why Hitchcock and Cronenberg are more performatively hysterical than his. Even so, "performing hysteria" has not often been the subject of interpretation so astute as found here, this despite medicine's awareness that the hysteric "perfo...

The Trade in Lunacy

Lunacy Reform

^JNDER this title there has recently been issued the report of the proceedings at a conference convened by Sir Frederick Willis, Chairman of the Board of Control, at which there were present Commissioners of the Board, Chairmen of Visiting Committees and Medical Superintendents of County and Borough Mental Hospitals. They met to consider " in what directions lunacy administration and the treatm...