This book examines the origins and early development of private mental health-care in England, showing that the current spectacle of commercially-based participation in key elements of service provision is no new phenomenon. In 1815, about seventy per cent of people institutionalised because of insanity were being kept in private 'madhouses'. The opening four chapters detail the emergence of these madhouses and demonstrate their increasing presence in London and across the country during the long eighteenth century. Subsequent chapters deal with specific aspects in greater depth - the insane patients themselves, their characteristics, and the circumstances surrounding admissions; the madhouse proprietors, their business activities, personal attributes and professional qualifications or lack of them; changing treatment practices and the principles that informed them. Finally, the book explores conditions within the madhouses, which ranged from the relatively enlightened to theseriously defective, and reveals the experiences, concerns and protests of their many critics.

Offers new archival findings on private institutional care, particularly addressing the scarcity of work on the pre-modern period Shows the key role played by the private sector in the development of institutions for the mentally ill over two hundred years Written by a leading scholar in the history of mental health, who draws on thirty years of archival research and work in this area

Autorentext
Leonard Smith is Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Applied Health Research, University of Birmingham, UK. His publications include 'Cure, Comfort and Safe Custody': Public Lunatic Asylums in Early Nineteenth-Century England (1999), Lunatic Hospitals in Georgian England, 1750-1830 (2007), and Insanity, Race and Colonialism: Managing Mental Disorder in the Post-Emancipation British Caribbean, 1838-1914 (2014).

Inhalt
1 Introduction - The Rise of the Private Madhouse.- 2 Houses for the Distracted, 1600-1700.- 3 Madhouses in the Market-Place, 1701-1774.- 4 An Expanding Madhouse Network, 1775-1815.- 5 Madhouse Patients.- 6 Madhouse Entrepreneurs.- 7 Therapeutics of the Madhouse.- 8 Conditions and Controversy.- 9 Conclusion - Insanity and Enterprise.-