Inconvenient People
Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad-Doctors in Victorian England
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
This highly original book brilliantly exposes the phenomenon of false allegations of lunacy and the dark motives behind them in the Victorian period.
Gaslight tales of rooftop escapes, men and women snatched in broad daylight, patients shut in coffins, a fanatical cult known as the Abode of Love…
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.
Sarah Wise uncovers twelve shocking stories, untold for over a century and reveals the darker side of the Victorian upper and middle classes – 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.'
‘A fine social history of the people who contested their confinement to madhouses in the 19th century, Wise offers striking arguments, suggesting that the public and juries were more intent on liberty than doctors and families’ Sunday Telegraph
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As Wise (The Blackest Streets) notes in this extraordinary psychosocial history, the "lunacy panics" of Victorian England were not unfounded at the time, astounding numbers of middle- and upper-class individuals were being forced or tricked into asylums. It could be considered a mark of progress that the "alienists" the name given at the time to the eponymous mad-doctors had made treatment part of the "agenda" at all, but Wise keenly points out that "this progress' had gone hand in hand with what, to many, seemed to be the pathologising of perfectly ordinary human weirdness." Included in the book are the remarkable stories of the high-strung Edward Davies, kidnapped at his family's request and duped into custodial care; John Perceval, whose angry letters and "peevish diary" led to his release from institutionalization and a subsequent tell-all; Louisa Nottidge, whose financial support of a cultish group and religious fanaticism got her committed; and Catherine Cumming, found by one doctor to be a lunatic; by another, an imbecile; and by still another, perfectly sane. "How safe was anyone when the experts had such divergent views of insanity?" Wise's meticulously researched study adds a fresh perspective to current scholarship on insanity and offers a chilling reminder of "the stubborn unchangeability of many aspects of the lunacy issue." Illus.
