Bill Forsythe

The politics of madness : the state, insanity and society in England, 1845-1914

1 Introduction: The English Asylum and its Historians 2 The Origins of the Asylum 3 The Asylum and the British State in the administration of pauper lunacy, 1845-1914 4 The Ethos of Treatment, Care and Management at the Asylum, 1845-1914 5 Journey to the Asylum: Residence, distance and migration in admissions to the Asylum, 1845-1914 6 Community, Friends and Family: Asylum, Lunatics and the social environment, 1845-1914 7 Reading the Rules of Domesticity: Gender, insanity and the asylum, 1845-1914 8 Madness and the Market: Occupations, class and the asylum, 1845-1914 9 The Patient Experience of the Pauper and Private Asylum 10 From Asylum Inmate to Outpatient: The remaking of the institutional landscape in the Twentieth Century, 1914-1990

Suffering, Faith and Penitence Amongst British Prisoners 1835 to 1860: The Application of a Theology

This article discusses suffering amongst some British prisoners prior to and post their imprisonment between 1835 and 1860. Those who revealed their suffering to officials tended to disclose this in the context of the evangelical Christian prison mission which was a dominant motif of prison discipline at this time. Clear themes of suffering emerged from their self disclosures, which prisoners themselves set in the context of a spiritual struggle which they experienced as highly problematic.

Foucault's Carceral and Ignatieff's Pentonville—English prisons and the revisionist analysis of control and penality

During the 1970s the work of Michel Foucault and Michael Ignatieff challenged the earlier somewhat optimistic general analysis of French and British penality during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Their accounts constituted a major revision of this subject and in the early 1980s there was a counter revisionist critique of their work in which it was argued that Foucault and Ignatieff had made substantial errors of fact and judgement. During the mid 1980s the dispute between revisionists and counter revisionists was further informed by the work of David Garland and Radzinowicz and Hood in relation to British penality during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this article the author considers these analyses specifically in relation to methods of reforming the attitude and conduct of prisoners and argues that revisionist and counter revisionist analyses both offer important insights into the actual historical development of the English prison system between 1775 and 1939.

Book Reviews: Punish or treat? Medical care in English prisons 1770–1850

Implicated thirty years ago as collusive agents of disciplinary repression by Michel Foucault and Michael Ignatieff, prison medical staff have not fared well at the hands of more recent revisionist penal historians such as Jo Sim. In this published version of his PhD thesis, Higgins, himself a retired medical practitioner, aims to correct what he sees as their biased and inaccurate account and to do so he has utilized records held in county and other archives, and consulted parliamentary papers and contemporary published literature. Beginning with a canter through the prospectus for prison government offered by the reformers of the late eighteenth century, Higgins focuses on John Howards emphasis on the duty of the state to provide health care for its prisoners. He charts the subsequent growth of more systematic provision of “prison surgeons” and infirmaries by the supervising magistrates. In the early nineteenth century these medical staff also began to measure the effects of the environment on the health of prisoners, and he concludes that a competent service developed with an independent ethos of knowledge-based medical care, offering treatments which were closely in line with the accepted methods of the day. Clinical practice in the prisons was influenced by the prevailing belief that atmospheric miasma communicated much disease. In that context Higgins examines the struggle with specific well publicized diseases such as typhus (gaol fever) and Asiatic cholera and evidences medical staff going to considerable lengths to intervene against these, using methods such as ingenious ventilation devices, sanitary improvement and cellular separation. But practitioners also had recourse to interventions not based on miasmic theory, for example vaccination against smallpox. Indeed most of the work of the prison surgeon involved recourse to an extensive pharma-copoeia to treat the less dramatically highlighted daily round of illness such as gastro-intestinal, ulcerous and venereal conditions. He concludes that at the forefront of the minds of these staff was combating disease and illness and curing prisoners effectively rather than subjugating and repressing them. Insanity, deaths in prison (including self-inflicted) and malingering attracted much attention from penal critics at the time, and Higgins assembles a wealth of case material to show the day to day realities behind the public rhetoric before turning finally to the relationship between prison surgeons and the prison authorities such as governors and magistrates. He uses the infamous scurvy outbreak at Millbank Penitentiary in the first six months of 1823 to challenge those who see this as a prime example of callous doctors colluding with the management to drive diets down to the point of starvation. I have two comments on detail. Higginss argument that William Baly, Medical Superintendent at Millbank, saw no connection between water quality and cholera needs qualification. Although admittedly Baly believed miasma to be the primary cause of its spread, my reading of the record is that he also saw foul water as a subsidiary, “exciting” cause. Secondly, what a poster from communist Russia urging death to lice in 1919 is doing reproduced in this book escapes me—I suspect it is a sacred cow the author should have slaughtered. I accept Higginss central contention that the history of prison medicine has too often been negatively labelled as collusive repression, although I think he swings the pendulum rather too far in the opposite direction. He has presented a wealth of evidence showing the suffering which prison medical staff encountered daily and the ingenuity and commitment they showed in confronting it. His book is a useful corrective to revisionist texts and, following the recent integration of prison health care with the community-based primary care trusts of the National Health Service, provides food for thought more generally.