Introduction

Abstract

The Introduction sets out key themes and arguments relating to private, voluntary and public asylum care in nineteenth-century Ireland. It situates the book within exiting scholarship, providing context on Irish and British frameworks. The nine asylums selected as case studies are introduced, along with an explanation of the other sources consulted and methodology used. It includes a discussion of the difficulties in accessing the patient’s view and defining social class in Ireland. Extract: Overall, this book argues that the failure of the nineteenth-century Irish state to provide accommodation for the non-pauper insane when setting up the district asylum system gained public, state and medical recognition, both at national and local level. Fresh and revised legislation and increased centralisation sought to address the challenges of accommodating this social cohort, while the lunacy inspectors, the medical community and the press raised the question of who should be legally, financially and morally accountable. No single solution was reached; instead, the state, philanthropists and private asylum proprietors came to share responsibility. This enabled many families to select between rival sectors of asylum provision. Meanwhile, the emerging psychiatric profession, sometimes sharing a sense of social equality with their paying patients, constructed class- and gender-based readings of their disorders, fashioning treatments and accommodation accordingly. The patients, acutely conscious of their own status and the threat incarceration posed to their social standing, entertained certain expectations of what their care should entail. Ultimately, however, mental illness apparently overtook class identity and often patients themselves threatened to disrupt the social decorum of the institutions in which they resided.