Abstract
It would be misleading to argue that the emergence of the lunacy laws in the nineteenth century was a response to the problem of social order. The mentally disordered were not enlisted in any form of political campaign and, unlike in France, their emancipation was not just part of a political programme. The magistrates who operated the lunacy laws regarded their tasks not as an expression of social control but as a social duty of the propertied classes to administer the local state. Therefore lunacy was a contemporary problem, but not one of order. In this sense, lunacy policy was not an object of class control but, like the poor laws, the subject of it.
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Notes and References
H. Spencer (1884) The Man Versus the State (Penguin, Harmondsworth) 1969 edition, p. 144.
B. Bosanquet et al. (1895) Aspects of the Social Problem (Macmillan, London).
C. S. Loch (1882) ‘Some Necessary Reforms in Charitable Work’, Charity Organisation Reporter (3 May) vol. XI, p. 238.
L. T. Hobhouse (1907) The Career of Fabianism.
B. Webb (1926) My Apprenticeship (Pitman Press, London) pp. 194–5.
Ibid., pp. 134–42.
The English social explorers included: Henry Mayhew (1816) London Labour and the London Poor;
Andrew Mearns (1883) The Bitter Cry of Outcast London;
Louise Twinning (1892) Outrelief and Charity Notes by a Lady Guardian;
Charles Booth (1889) Labour and Life of the People of London;
B. S. Rowntree (1901) Poverty: a Study of Town Life.
A. T. Scull (1979) Museums of Madness: The Social Organisation of Insanity in 19th Century England (Allen Lane, London) p. 232.
M. Crackanthorpe (1908) ‘Eugenics as a Social Force’, The Nineteenth Century and After, vol. LXIII (June) pp. 962–3.
K. Jones (1960) Mental Health and Social Policy 1845–1959 (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London) pp. 56–7.
British Medical Association (1911) Some Reasons why the Public should oppose the Insurance Act (30 December).
Examples of the mentally disordered soldiers appeared in: Rebecca West (1918) The Return of the Soldier;
Vera Brittain (1933) Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900–25 (Virago edn, 1978) pp. 355–62.
P. Abrams (1963) ‘The Failure of Social Reform 1918–1920, Past and Present, no. 24 (April) pp. 43–64.
M. Lomax (1921) The Experiences of an Asylum Doctor (George Allen and Unwin, London).
Ibid., p. 60. Lomax cited the death rate from TB in the general hospitals and in the asylums, as follows: asylum TB death rate = 16.1 per 1000 in 1915; general hospital TB death rate = 1.6 per 1000 in 1915.
Board of Control (1924), Dietaries in Mental Hospitals, Departmental Committee Report (non-Parliamentary Paper) May–March.
Board of Control (1924), Nursing in County and County Borough Hospitals (non-Parliamentary Paper).
N. Timms (1964) Psychiatric Social Work in Great Britain, 1939–1962 (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London) p. 41.
Ibid., p. 43.
Ministry of Health (1939), Departmental Committee on Voluntary Mental Health Services (The Feversham Report).
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© 1985 Tom Butler
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Butler, T. (1985). Society, Social Policy and Lunacy: the Limits to the Legal Approach, 1890–1939. In: Mental Health, Social Policy and the Law. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07439-6_4
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