Pedagogy and the Building of British Psychiatry at the Age of Asylum, 1792–1914

This thesis argues that the establishment of psychiatric education played an integral part in shaping British psychiatry as a medical specialism in the long nineteenth century. It identifies five phases in the development of instruction on mental disease during that period: entrepreneurial (1792–1840), clinical (1841–1858), scientific (1859–1875), compulsory (1876–1886) and specialist (1887–1914). Psychiatric education was a part of medical education and shared its main trends; however, there were peculiar characteristics and challenges connected to the peculiarities of medical practice in lunatic asylums. The thesis places education on insanity in the context of three areas of historical research: the history of medical education, the history of psychiatry, and the history of print culture. It draws on a wealth of archival and printed sources which have not previously been examined alongside each other: reports and minutes of professional associations and medical corporations, lecture notes by teachers on mental disease and their students, institutional archives of medical schools and asylums, parliamentary papers, lay and medical periodicals, and psychiatric books and textbooks. The use of this diversity of sources and historiographical approaches allows the thesis to develop a complex and nuanced narrative and to challenge long-held assumptions about psychiatry’s place in medicine, the construction of knowledge on mental disease and the position of the lunatic asylum as the sole institution responsible for the development of psychiatry at the time. In their place, the thesis offers an account of nineteenth-century psychiatry as deeply rooted in the general medical context and responsive to changing societal and professional demands.