All parts of Britain and Ireland had laws to safeguard the physical welfare and supervise the management of the finances, of adults with a mental illness or impairment. These laws remained more or less unchanged from the Middle Ages until the twentieth century and the essential principles are still enshrined in very recent legislation. This podcast looks at the legal procedures necessary to prove that a person could not manage their own affairs and at the place of medical certification in admission to an asylum.
Image of the week: old man suffering from senile dementia, c. 1890
Full Bibliographic Record: Wellcome Library Catalogue L0026689
Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/