Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum: Doctors, Patients, and Practices

This book explores how the body was investigated in the late nineteenth-century asylum in Britain. As more and more Victorian asylum doctors looked to the bodily fabric to reveal the 'truth' of mental disease, a whole host of techniques and technologies were brought to bear upon the patien...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Jennifer Wallis (auth)
Format: Electronic Book Chapter
Language:English
Published: Palgrave Macmillan 2017
Series:Mental Health in Historical Perspective
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Summary:This book explores how the body was investigated in the late nineteenth-century asylum in Britain. As more and more Victorian asylum doctors looked to the bodily fabric to reveal the 'truth' of mental disease, a whole host of techniques and technologies were brought to bear upon the patient's body. These practices encompassed the clinical and the pathological, from testing the patient's reflexes to dissecting the brain. Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum takes a unique approach to the topic, conducting a chapter-by-chapter dissection of the body. It considers how asylum doctors viewed and investigated the skin, muscles, bones, brain, and bodily fluids. The book demonstrates the importance of the body in nineteenth-century psychiatry as well as how the asylum functioned as a site of research, and will be of value to historians of psychiatry, the body, and scientific practice.
Physical Description:1 electronic resource (276 p.)
ISBN:/doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56714-3
9783319567136
9783319567143
Access:Open Access