The Founding Stories

The asylum arrived with an account of itself — chains struck off, science and humanity at last united. Every episode in that account is real. This is what happens when you count them.

A course on the thought of The Asylum.

Psychology · Medicine

What you will learn

• Reconstruct how the York abuses were actually exposed, and over how long.
• Explain why becoming a governor was the decisive move.
• Distinguish what each of the two fires at York destroyed, and on whose authority the claim rests.
• State Foucault's claim about the classical period accurately.
• Give the counts for Bristol, Oxfordshire, Montpellier and Dijon.
• Say precisely which part of the claim a count can settle and which part it cannot.
• State the class-control thesis in the form its proponents give it.
• Explain what the presence of gentry and nobility in madhouses does to it.

Course outline

1. The Twenty Pounds — A magistrate sent a pauper to the York Asylum and got him back starving. When the governors refused to investigate, he and his allies bought their way onto the board — and found four cells nobody was…
2. The Great Confinement, Counted — Foucault argued that the age of reason shut unreason away across Europe. Two towns of thirty thousand people, one in England and one in France, had about twenty confined madmen between them at the…
3. Not the Rabble — The asylum is often read as a machine for disciplining the poor. A majority of the confined were poor. But the trade could not have survived on them, and the historian who says so is not defending…
4. The Men First — Pinel really did have the chains struck off at the Bicêtre and the Salpêtrière in 1793. He reached the men first and the women some weeks later — and the painting that made the story famous shows…
5. Six Years After Hannah Mills — A Leeds widow died in the York Asylum in 1790 and her Quaker meeting was refused permission to visit her. What they built in response took six years, worked, and moved restraint from the wrists to…
6. One Lunatic, No Licence — Regulation arrived: licences, inspectors, two physicians' certificates. It applied to a house holding two lunatics and not to a house holding one, and it did not apply at all to a family keeping its…

Terms introduced

the great confinement, moral treatment, moral management, mechanical restraint, the trade in lunacy, single patient, Commissioners in Lunacy, certification

Part of the Simposeum course library.