Writing Mad Lives in the Age of the Asylum
Seiten
2025
Oxford University Press Inc (Verlag)
978-0-19-760483-0 (ISBN)
Oxford University Press Inc (Verlag)
978-0-19-760483-0 (ISBN)
The asylum--at once a place of refuge, incarceration, and abuse--touched the lives of many Americans living between 1830 and 1950. What began as a few scattered institutions in the mid-eighteenth century grew to 579 public and private asylums by the 1940s. About one out of every 280 Americans was an inmate in an asylum at an annual cost to taxpayers of approximately $200 million.
Using the writing of former asylum inmates, as well as other sources, Writing Mad Lives in the Age of the Asylum reveals a history of madness and the asylum that has remained hidden by a focus on doctors, diagnoses, and other interventions into mad people's lives. Although those details are present in this story, its focus is the hundreds of inmates who spoke out or published pamphlets, memorials, memoirs, and articles about their experiences. They recalled physical beatings and prolonged restraint and isolation. They described what it felt like to be gawked at like animals by visitors and the hardships they faced re-entering the community. Many inmates argued that asylums were more akin to prisons than medical facilities and testified before state legislatures and the US Congress, lobbying for reforms to what became popularly known as "lunacy laws."
Michael Rembis demonstrates how their stories influenced popular, legal, and medical conceptualizations of madness and the asylum at a time when most Americans seemed to be groping toward a more modern understanding of the many different forms of "insanity." The result is a clearer sense of the role of mad people and their allies in shaping one of the largest state expenditures in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--and, at the same time, a recovery of the social and political agency of these vibrant and dynamic "mad writers."
Using the writing of former asylum inmates, as well as other sources, Writing Mad Lives in the Age of the Asylum reveals a history of madness and the asylum that has remained hidden by a focus on doctors, diagnoses, and other interventions into mad people's lives. Although those details are present in this story, its focus is the hundreds of inmates who spoke out or published pamphlets, memorials, memoirs, and articles about their experiences. They recalled physical beatings and prolonged restraint and isolation. They described what it felt like to be gawked at like animals by visitors and the hardships they faced re-entering the community. Many inmates argued that asylums were more akin to prisons than medical facilities and testified before state legislatures and the US Congress, lobbying for reforms to what became popularly known as "lunacy laws."
Michael Rembis demonstrates how their stories influenced popular, legal, and medical conceptualizations of madness and the asylum at a time when most Americans seemed to be groping toward a more modern understanding of the many different forms of "insanity." The result is a clearer sense of the role of mad people and their allies in shaping one of the largest state expenditures in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--and, at the same time, a recovery of the social and political agency of these vibrant and dynamic "mad writers."
Michael Rembis is the Director of the Center for Disability Studies and Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). He has served on the American Historical Association's Committee on Disability, the Organization of American Historians Committee on Disability and Disability History, and the board of directors of the Society for Disability Studies.
Introduction: Hearing Voices
Chapter 1: Claiming Madness
Chapter 2: Committing Violence
Chapter 3: Writing and Work
Chapter 4: Exposing Abuses
Chapter 5: Reforming the System
Chapter 6: Reckoning with Physicians
Chapter 7: Surviving Treatments
Chapter 8: Forging Friendships
Chapter 9: Helping Each Other
Epilogue: Telling Stories
Notes
Bibliography
Index
| Erscheinungsdatum | 15.05.2025 |
|---|---|
| Zusatzinfo | 19 b/w images |
| Verlagsort | New York |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 155 x 226 mm |
| Gewicht | 567 g |
| Themenwelt | Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte |
| Geisteswissenschaften ► Psychologie ► Allgemeine Psychologie | |
| Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie | |
| ISBN-10 | 0-19-760483-8 / 0197604838 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0-19-760483-0 / 9780197604830 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
| Informationen gemäß Produktsicherheitsverordnung (GPSR) | |
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