Understanding Pupil Behaviour in School by Wearmouth Janice;Glynn Ted;Richmond Robin C.;Berryman Mere;

Author:Wearmouth, Janice;Glynn, Ted;Richmond, Robin C.;Berryman, Mere;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: David Fulton Publishers

Gradually these separate apartments, the asylums, began to be built, beginning slowly in the middle of the eighteenth century and given further encouragement by the 1845 Asylums Act, which compelled local justices to set up publicly run asylums. This development marked the first systematic involvement of the state in the care and control of the insane in European society.

At first, the asylums were seen as places where lunatics could be contained, and attempts at therapeutic intervention were rare. In a few asylums run by Quakers (for example, Tuke at the York Asylums), there evolved what was known as 'moral treatment' (Scull 1981a). In most institutions, however, lunatics were treated like animals and kept in appalling conditions. The Bethlem Hospital in London, for instance, was open to the public, who could enter to watch the lunatics for a penny a time. During this early period of the growth of the asylums movement, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the medical profession had relatively little interest in the insane. From the historical investigations carried out by Scull (1975), it can be seen that the medical profession gradually came to recognize that there were profits to be made from the 'trade in lunacy', not only from having control of the state asylums which were publicly funded, but also from running asylums for the insane members of the upper classes. The political power of the medical profession allowed it, in Britain, to influence the contents of Acts of Parliament which gave the medical profession control over asylums. The defeat of moral treatment can be seen as a key moment in the history of psychotherapy: science replaced religion as the dominant ideology underlying the treatment of the insane.

During the remainder of the nineteenth century, the medical profession consolidated its control over the 'trade in lunacy'. Part of the process of consolidation involved rewriting the history of madness. Religious forms of care of the insane were characterized as 'demonology', and the persecution of witches was portrayed, erroneously, as a major strand in the pre-scientific or pre-medical approach to madness (Szasz 1971; Kirsch 1978; Spanos 1978). Medical and biological explanations for insanity were formulated, such as phrenology (Cooter 1981) and sexual indulgence or masturbation (Hare 1962). Different types of physical treatment were experimented with:

hypodermic injections of morphia, the administration of the bromides, chloral hydrate, hypocymine, physotigma, cannabis indicta, amyl nitrate, conium, digitalis, ergot, pilocarpine, the application of electricity, the use of the Turkish bath and the wet pack, and other remedies too numerous to mention, have had their strenuous advocates.

(Tuke, History of the Insane, 1882, cited in Scull 1979)

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