Care of the psyche: a history of psychological healing

custodial functions. This can lead to misleading comparisons with the twentieth century and the conclusion to Mental disability in Victorian England seems unduly pessimistic. Wright has clearly been influenced by the important work on the early twentieth century by Mark Jackson and Mathew Thomson but, although both stress the rise of eugenic ideologies and segregationist practices, neither has much to say about the voluntary institutions established in the nineteenth century. There is clearly no doubt that by 1900 the optimistic belief in the educational potential of idiot children that had led to the foundation of the Earlswood Asylum had been severely challenged by practical experience and eugenic rhetoric. Yet Wright's analysis suggests that each decade between 1840 and 1900 presented the institution with new challenges, constraints and also opportunities. There is no reason to believe that the Earlswood Asylum could not continue to provide a specialist model of care designed for a niche market. Wright himself identifies the late-nineteenth-century demand for short stay accommodation for patients who were younger, and wealthier, than the groups later targeted by the Mental Deficiency Acts. There is little evidence that this declined over time. My own work on another of the voluntary idiot asylums that explicitly copied the Earlswood model suggests that the complex motivations of the founders provided a problematic legacy for future institutional managers. Yet the voluntary idiot asylums continued to offer a model of care quite distinct from institutions established at a later date. The enduring legacy of the voluntary idiot asylums, and their influence over later care programmes, simply underlines the importance of Earlswood as a pioneering institution and Wright's thoughtful and comprehensive study.