Gonaver, Wendy (Author)
University of North Carolina Press
Publication date: 2019
Language: English
Physical Details: 268
Though the origins of asylums can be traced to Europe, the systematic segregation of the mentally ill into specialized institutions occurred in the United States only after 1800, just as the struggle to end slavery took hold. In this book, Wendy Gonaver examines the relationship between these two historical developments, showing how slavery and ideas about race shaped early mental health treatment in the United States, especially in the South. She reveals these connections through the histories of two asylums in Virginia: the Eastern Lunatic Asylum in Williamsburg, the first in the nation; and the Central Lunatic Asylum in Petersburg, the first created specifically for African Americans. Eastern Lunatic Asylum was the only institution to accept both slaves and free blacks as patients and to employ slaves as attendants.Drawing from these institutions' untapped archives, Gonaver reveals how slavery influenced ideas about patient liberty, about the proper relationship between caregiver and patient, about what constituted healthy religious belief and unhealthy fanaticism, and about gender. This early form of psychiatric care acted as a precursor to public health policy for generations, and Gonaver's book fills an important gap in the historiography of mental health and race in the nineteenth century.
...MoreReview Deborah Doroshow (2020) Review of "The Peculiar Institution and the Making of Modern Psychiatry, 1840–1880". Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (pp. 450-452).
Review Martin Anthony Summers (2020) Review of "The Peculiar Institution and the Making of Modern Psychiatry, 1840–1880". Journal of American History (pp. 202-203).
Review Christopher M. Blakley (2020) Review of "The Peculiar Institution and the Making of Modern Psychiatry, 1840–1880". British Journal for the History of Science (pp. 596-597).
Review Christienna Fryar (2020) Review of "The Peculiar Institution and the Making of Modern Psychiatry, 1840–1880". Social History of Medicine (pp. 1390-1391).
Similar Citations
Thesis
Kristi M. Simon;
(2018)
The Controversy Surrounding Slave Insanity: The Diagnosis, Treatment and Lived Experience of Mentally Ill Slaves in the Antebellum South
Article
Lockley, Tim;
(2013)
Black Mortality in Antebellum Savannah
Article
Doyle, Dennis;
(2009)
“A Fine New Child”: The Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic and Harlem's African American Communities, 1946--1958
Article
Kenny, Stephen C.;
(2010)
“A Dictate of Both Interest and Mercy”? Slave Hospitals in the Antebellum South
Article
Élodie Grossi;
(2021)
Truth in numbers? Emancipation, race, and federal census statistics in the debates over Black mental health in the United States, 1840–1900
Article
Christopher D. E. Willoughby;
(2018)
Running Away from Drapetomania: Samuel A. Cartwright, Medicine, and Race in the Antebellum South
Article
Tunc, Tanfer Emin;
(2010)
The Mistress, the Midwife, and the Medical Doctor: Pregnancy and Childbirth on the Plantations of the Antebellum American South, 1800--1860
Article
Emily West;
R. J. Knight;
(2017)
Mothers' Milk: Slavery, Wet-Nursing, and Black and White Women in the Antebellum South
Thesis
Hogarth, Rana Asali;
(2012)
Comparing Anatomies, Constructing Races: Medicine and Slavery in the Atlantic World, 1787--1838
Article
Segrest, Mab;
(2014)
Exalted on the Ward: “Mary Roberts,” the Georgia State Sanitarium, and the Psychiatric “Speciality” of Race
Book
Katherine Johnston;
(2022)
The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World
Thesis
Reed, Adam Metcalfe;
(2014)
Mental Death: Slavery, Madness and State Violence in the United States
Article
Doyle, Dennis;
(2009)
“Where the Need is Greatest”: Social Psychiatry and Race-Blind Universalism in Harlem's Lafargue Clinic, 1946--1958
Article
Summers, Martin;
(2010)
“Suitable Care of the African When Afflicted With Insanity”: Race, Madness, and Social Order in Comparative Perspective
Article
Ji-Hye Shin;
(2021)
“Insanity Is the Price of Modern Civilization”: The Discourse of Civilization and the Asian Insane in Modern America
Book
Thomas, Karen Kruse;
(2011)
Deluxe Jim Crow: Civil Rights and American Health Policy, 1935--1954
Book
Ziff, Katherine K.;
(2012)
Asylum on the Hill: History of a Healing Landscape
Book
Christian Pinnen;
(2021)
Complexion of Empire in Natchez: Race and Slavery in the Mississippi Borderlands
Book
Szasz, Thomas Stephen;
(2002)
Liberation by Oppression: A Comparative Study of Slavery and Psychiatry
Book
Mary E. Lyons;
(2020)
Slave labor on Virginia's Blue Ridge Railroad
Be the first to comment!