Death and the dead-house in Victorian asylums: necroscopy versus mourning at the Royal Edinburgh Asylum,c. 1832–1901

Abstract

This article examines the management and meaning of post-mortem examinations, and the spatial ordering of patients' death, dissection and burial at the Victorian asylum, referencing a range of institutional contexts and exploiting a case study of the Royal Edinburgh Asylum. The routinizing of dissection and the development of the dead-house from a more marginal asylum sector to a lynchpin of laboratory medicine is stressed. External and internal pressure to modernize pathological research facilities is assessed alongside governmental, public and professional critiques of variable necroscopy practices. This is contextualized against wider issues and attitudes surrounding consent and funereal rituals. Onus is placed on tendencies in anatomizing insanity towards the conversion of deceased lunatics--pauper lunatics especially--into mere pathological specimens. On the other hand, significant but compromised resistance on the part of a minority of practitioners, relatives and the wider public is also identified.

Post-mortem in the Victorian asylum: practice, purpose and findings at the Littlemore County Lunatic Asylum, 1886–7

“…Fears over the prospect of dissection are likely to have weighed heavily on the minds of the patients themselves. Andrews (2012) states that paupers at the Royal Edinburgh Asylum were probably employed to make coffins and shrouds, and this made the idea of death ever-present in the inmate's life. This may also have made their families even more sympathetic to their relatives' fear of dissection.…”

“…The post-mortem was part of the fabric of the asylum system, and yet the practice, purpose and findings of the examination in the asylum setting have only begun to receive academic attention in the last few years and are still seriously understudied in the historiography of mental healthcare. Some of the most significant works on the subject to date include those of Andrews (2012), MacDonald (2011), MacKinnon (2011), and Wright, Jacklin and Themeles (2013). MacDonald has discussed questions of consent with regard to the dissection of asylum bodies in Australia and Britain, while MacKinnon's work on dissecting the mad in Colonial Victoria (Australia) highlights the lack of work on post-mortems within the history of psychiatry and examines the fate of asylum bodies.…”

Introduction: histories of asylums, insanity and psychiatry in Scotland

“…A decade before this work, a dedicated PhD thesis examined the REA’s origins and running, scrutinizing the imprint of leading superintendent Thomas Clouston, and minutely profiling the socio-medical profiles of private and pauper patients, while a chapter emerging from this study elucidated the management and medico-moral meaning of alcohol at the same asylum ( Thompson, 1984 , 1988 ). Since then, further close analysis of patient admissions (1873–1908) to Clouston’s asylum has been conducted ( Beveridge, 1995a , 1995b ), while a more recent study has elucidated patient death and disposal, the clinical, spatial and moral functions of REA’s ‘dead house’, and wider anatomo-pathological debates ( Andrews, 2012 ).…”

The bones of the insane

“…At post-mortem, the body had the power to reveal ‘what really happened’ ( Laqueur, 1989 : 195), and in late nineteenth-century alienism the procedure was peculiarly important to the study of mental disease due to its ability to uncover what might be concealed during life. ‘Insanity masks and modifies the symptoms of bodily disease,’ noted Crichton-Browne, ‘so that pneumonia may sometimes be found after death when its presence had not been betrayed during life … And it is the same with other diseases and with injuries.’ 3 The post-mortem was crucial in understanding how mental disease could affect the body by collecting together a number of specimens in order to identify patterns, as well as in clarifying doubts about death ( Andrews, 2012 : 9).…”