Overview
- Expands upon existing scholarship to explore the provision of mental healthcare for paying patients in Irish asylums
- Compares the experiences of Irish paying patients with those of British patients in both private and public asylums
- Examines the impact of class, socio-economics, religion and gender on patterns of committal, care and treatment
- Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras
Part of the book series: Mental Health in Historical Perspective (MHHP)
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Table of contents (7 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Governing Insanity
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Front Matter
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Understanding Insanity
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This open access book is the first comparative study of public, voluntary and private asylums in nineteenth-century Ireland. Examining nine institutions, it explores whether concepts of social class and status and the emergence of a strong middle class informed interactions between gender, religion, identity and insanity. It questions whether medical and lay explanations of mental illness and its causes, and patient experiences, were influenced by these concepts. The strong emphasis on land and its interconnectedness with notions of class identity and respectability in Ireland lends a particularly interesting dimension. The book interrogates the popular notion that relatives were routinely locked away to be deprived of land or inheritance, querying how often “land grabbing” Irish families really abused the asylum system for their personal economic gain. The book will be of interest to scholars of nineteenth-century Ireland and the history of psychiatry and medicine in Britain and Ireland.
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Alice Mauger is a Wellcome Trust Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland, University College Dublin. She has published on the history of psychiatry and medicine in Ireland, including in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Cost of Insanity in Nineteenth-Century Ireland
Book Subtitle: Public, Voluntary and Private Asylum Care
Authors: Alice Mauger
Series Title: Mental Health in Historical Perspective
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65244-3
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-65243-6Published: 26 January 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-87983-3Published: 04 June 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-65244-3Published: 21 December 2017
Series ISSN: 2634-6036
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6044
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XVI, 281
Number of Illustrations: 5 b/w illustrations
Topics: History of Britain and Ireland, Social History, Psychiatry, History of Medicine, Modern History