Inconvenient people
Subtitle: lunacy, liberty and the mad-doctors in Victorian England
By: Sarah Wise
Publisher: Bodley Head
Published: 2012
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 473
ISBN-13: 9781847921123
Subjects: Psychiatry; Methodology; History; Psychiatric hospitals; Mentally ill; Commitment and detention; Insanity (Law); Psychiatric hospital patients; Social conditions
Description: "The nineteenth century saw repeated panics about sane individuals being locked away in lunatic asylums. With the rise of the 'mad-doctor' profession, English liberty seemed to be threatened by a new generation of medical men willing to incarcerate difficult family members in return for the high fees paid by an unscrupulous spouse or friend. And contrary to popular modern belief, the madwoman in the attic was at least as likely to have been a madman. Sarah Wise uncovers twelve shocking stories, some told for over a century, which reveal the darker side of the Victorian upper and middle class - their sexuality, fears of inherited madness, financial greed and fraudulence - and chillingly evoke the black motives at the heart of the phenomenon of the 'inconvenient person.' --Inside jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical notes (p. [409]-438), bibliography (p. [439]-447) and index.
Table of contents: title: 1. Being "burrowsed"; title: 2. The attorney-general of all Her Majesty's madmen; title: 3. The Alleged Lunatics' Friend Society; title: 4. "Oh hail, holy love!"; title: 5. "If I had been poor, they would have left me alone"; title: 6. "Gaskell is single-patient hunting"; title: 7. The woman in yellow; title: 8. Juries in revolt; title: 9. Dialoguing with the unseen; title: 10. "Be sure you don't fall, Georgie!"; title: Epilogue: The savage new century.