Insanity Asylum Volume 2 Dvd Download Torrent
Elpidio Heart
James Moran's finely nuanced study of the nineteenth-century asylum experience in the central Canadian provinces of Quebec and Ontario is a good case in point. Moran makes a strong case that historians of nineteenth-century psychiatry have been somewhat myopic, their gaze too narrowly focused on the asylum per se, the institution viewed solely as the product of the professional aspirations of a fledgling psychiatry and the "social control" needs of an emergent nineteenth-century state. What has been ignored more generally is "the community": the [End Page 204] individual families and local functionaries whose own pressing needs and demands, as Moran demonstrates, most often shaped the place and role of the asylum in the nineteenth-century social order. Regardless of the attempt of both alienists and state officials to "medicalize" madness, it was above all the lay perceptions of insanity that most fundamentally dictated community responses to the insane and the uses to which the asylum was put. In sum, as Moran concludes, "the state lunatic asylum was the product of complex, conflicting relationships between state, psychiatric and community forces" in nineteenth-century Canada (p. 172).
A further virtue of this work is Moran's comparative approach. By thoroughly analyzing the creation and evolution of the asylum in two different provinces, he shows that generalizations about nineteenth-century "state formation" need to be more carefully theorized and more firmly anchored in "locality." Quebec's "farming out" system of proprietary asylums, over which the Quebec government exercised little real control until the end of the nineteenth century, stood in marked contrast to the highly centralized system of Ontario asylums. The crucial difference: the Roman Catholic church in Quebec and its long history, dating back to New France, of religious orders providing for the charity and "social service" needs of the Quebec community.
I have only two small quibbles with this fine book. To these Canadian ears at least, the book's title "Committed to the State Asylum" is somewhat jarring; I recognize the author's focus on "state formation," but why not "Committed to the Provincial Asylum"? More generally, by design Moran does not address another area that has been receiving increased attention from a new generation of asylum historians: the patient experience. Fortunately, another equally fine study, Geoffrey Reaume's Remembrance of Patients Past: PatientLife at the Toronto Hospital of the Insane, 1870-1940, has just appeared. When these two works are read in parallel, they provide us with our most nuanced portrait yet of the nineteenth-century Canadian asylum experience. And yet perhaps two caveats. First, Quebec and Ontario (despite their own view of the matter!) are not Canada. I find it somewhat disconcerting that after thirty years of solid work in Canadian psychiatric history our only "comprehensive" history of the nineteenth-century Canadian asylum experience remains T. J. W. Burgess's "A Historical Sketch of Our Canadian Institutions for the Insane," published in 1898! Where is our Canadian Gerald Grob? Second, Canadian historians of the asylum have remained fixated, for the most part, on the nineteenth century. We need more attention to the twentieth-century asylum experience in Canada, especially to the...
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