Alannah Tomkins

Mad doctors? The significance of medical practitioners admitted as patients to the first English county asylums up to 1890

‘Mad doctors’ specialized in treating the insane, but what about the doctors whose own mental health was jeopardized? Oppenheim found that doctors who attended the mad were presumed to be particularly vulnerable, but there has been no research investigating this claim, nor identifying practitioners’ experiences as patients. This article analyses medical admissions to asylums via both case notes and other sources such as newspaper reports, revealing the responses of medical superintendents to their former colleagues and, in some cases, the judgements of practitioners on their institutional surroundings. It indicates the impact of work-related stress, as medicine became self-consciously professional, and the evolution of public reactions to doctors who could not maintain an appropriately sane identity.

Poverty and Welfare in Guernsey 1560–2015

gious and political associations of the theme by drawing formal analogies between Cimon and Saint Peter. In the eighteenth century, Greuze and his contemporaries used the theme of Roman Charity to experiment with a hybridisation of the genre by infusing it with ‘bourgeois’ aesthetic elements, while at the same time, the motif became politicised and oscillated between utopian dreams of the ‘good father’ and fantasies of parricide. The second section of the book, titled ‘Texts and Contexts’, traces the different horizons of expectation that early modern viewers brought to bear on renderings of Roman Charity. Whilst analysing the millenarian literary tradition of the motif, it examines the practice of adult breastfeeding in medical writings and the gendered nature of milk cures. This section also inspects the interlocking iconographies of Charity, the Madonna Lactans (The Nursing Madonna) and other related breastfeeding imagery, while also investigating father–daughter relationships in legal discourse. Despite the separation between ‘images’ and ‘texts’, this comprehensive research, which is based on a multidisciplinary approach, combining history, art history, visual studies, critical theories, queer studies and psychoanalysis, reflects a profound comprehension of both artistic artefacts and theoretical thinking. While Sterling’s methodological approach reflects her commitment to theoretically informed research on women and gender, she remains obliged to visual imagery, giving them back their agency. Her study seeks to establish the lactating breast as a signifier of desire at a time when early modern subjectivities are commonly believed to have emerged under the sign of the phallus. In employing a variety of perspectives on the iconography of Pero and Cimon, Sterling’s book proposes to shed light on several broader issues: the occurrences of patriarchal exclusions in early modern Europe; the figuration of paternal power and phantasies surrounding the eroticised maternal body, all while stressing the importance of the emerging field of ‘lactation studies’ as a stimulating area of historical research.

Retirement from the Noise and Hurry of the World? The Experience of Almshouse Life

Almshouse living has enjoyed a broadly positive image with historians and the public alike. The survival of attractive ranges of buildings, bearing tablets to commemorate founders’ virtues, has ensured that the architectural features of almshouses provided an early focus for study.1 Charities that remain operative tend to reinforce this perception; recently the Mary Feilding Guild residential home in north London was described as ‘harder to get into than an Oxbridge college’, emphasising both its exclusivity and its desirability.2 The residential experiences of occupants in the past have been less well surveyed, mainly because obvious or concentrated sources of information remain sparse. As a result almshouses have been treated as individual institutions by local historians, but assessments of their collective impact are notably few.3 The issue is complicated by terminology since the terms almshouse, poorhouse, and hospital were used variously by contemporaries. Other locally-derived terms include ‘guildhouse’, ‘callis’ and ‘gift houses’.4 Here, ‘almshouse’ is a generic label to refer to a house established by voluntary charity (rather than from local taxes) with a fixed number of spaces; they were probably founded most often by individual testators who wished to leave a permanent memorial to their own philanthropy, but almshouses were also established by monarchs, trade guilds and others. Some hospitals established under the pre-Reformation church continued to operate as almshouses in this period, while 1600–40 is regarded as a period of numerous foundations by bequest.5

CATHEDRAL ALMSMEN: A NEW PROSOPOGRAPHICAL PROJECT

on two or three sample institutions initially before progressing to a treatment of all 14 new-foundation cathedrals, since the number of individuals who became almsmen throughout the country in this period may be in excess of 5,000. To this end, the project will require the development of a customised database to contain information about the almsmen from different types of documentary source. Ideally the database should permit the retention or at