Suggested Reading

History of Psychiatry and Asylums

A list of background and suggested reading is available on the History of Psychiatry in Britain since 1500 website, plus links to two series of podcasts exploring the history of psychiatry since the Renaissance.  The episodes in Section 7 deal specifically with the rise and decline of asylums.

Photography and the Asylum

The following selected reading offers an insight into how photography came to be used in the asylum.

Barfoot, M.  Morrison-Low., A D (1999). WC M’Intosh and AJ Macfarlan: Early clinical photography in Scotland. History of Photography, 23(3), 199 – 210.

Burrows, A., & Schumacher, I. (1990). Portraits of the Insane: The Case of Dr. Diamond: Quartet Books.

Fox, D.M.  & Lawrence, C. J.. (1988).  Photographing Medicine: Images and Power in Britain and America Since 1840: Greenwood Press.

Gilman, S., Diamond, H., & Conolly, J. (2015). The Face of Madness: Hugh W. Diamond and the Origin of Psychiatric Photography: Echo Point Books and Media.

Gilman, S. L. (1995). Health and Illness: Images of Difference: Reaktion Books.

Godbey, E. (2000). Picture Me Sane: Photography and the Magic Lantern in a Nineteenth Century Asylum. American Studies, 41(31 – 69).

Green-Lewis, J. (1996). Framing the Victorians: Photography and the Culture of Realism: Cornell University Press.

Haller, B. a. L., Robin. (2005). Persuading Sanity: Magic Lantern Images and the Nineteenth-Century Moral Treatment in America. Journal of American Culture, 28(3), 259 – 272.

Lansdown, R. (2011). Photographing Madness. History Today, September.

Pearl, S. (2009). Through a Mediated Mirror: The Photographic Physiognomy of Dr Hugh Welch Diamond. History of Photography, 33(3), 288-305.

Pearl, S. (2010). About Faces: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Harvard University Press.

Rawling, K. D. B. (2011). Visualising Mental Illness: Gender, Medicine and Visual Media c. 1850 – 1910. (PhD), Royal Holloway College, University of London.

Sidlauskas, S. (2013). Inventing the medical portrait: photography at the ‘Benevolent Asylum’ of Holloway, c. 1885–1889. Medical Humanities, 39(1), 29-37. doi:10.1136/medhum-2012-010280

Summerley, P. A. V. (2003). Visual pathology: A case study in late nineteenth century clinical photography in Glasgow, Scotland. (PhD), University of Glasgow.