History of Medicine #9: A Case Study in Mid Twentieth-Century “Charitable” Psychiatry
From the beginning of the eighteenth century a pattern of different forms of institutional provision for mentally disordered people emerged in England, which included workhouses, private madhouses, the voluntary mental hospitals, and then from 1808 the publicly funded county and borough mental hospitals. The historiography of mental hospitals has concentrated almost exclusively on the public mental hospitals, and continues to focus mostly on the nineteenth century. Little primary research has been done on the Registered Hospitals, as the voluntary mental hospitals became in 1845, and relatively little attention has been paid to the period in the twentieth century between c1920 and c1960, in which significant changes took place to the whole pattern of provision. This seminar took place at Oxford Brookes University on 3 May 2011