The most abundant sources for understanding the history of psychiatry are medical case notes, kept by asylum staff. In addition, petitions for admission gave accounts of behaviour that precipitated the… Read more »
Last week I looked at some regulations from Cardiff District Asylum at the start of the twentieth century. One of their main functions was to restrict communication between patients and… Read more »
In this podcast and the next four, we’re going to look at what patients made of entering and being in what we call mental hospitals and what were known until… Read more »
Eighteenth and nineteenth century English coroners’ inquests investigated roughly one death in every twenty. Their main task was to discover if someone else might have been involved or if a… Read more »
These nine examples of letters, diaries, and notes build up to what I think is a compelling picture of the despair and powerlessness felt by suicides. Some were left by… Read more »