"Space, Division, Classification": Gender, Class, and Race in the Treatment of Insanity in 19th-Century New England Lunatic Asylums

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Constructing Bodies and Persons: Health and Medicine in Historic Social Context" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The nineteenth-century lunatic asylum was envisioned as a curative environment, which would administer salutary influences to the mind through the medium of sensory experience. Bucolic vistas and attractively furnished wards, calming music and freedom from the disturbing racket of urban life, appetizing food, clean air, fresh water, proper clothing, and the particular spatial logics of the buildings themselves were all mobilized as therapeutic instruments within the asylum model. However, both the archaeological and documentary records suggest the ways in which access to these therapeutic resources were heavily modulated by the class, gender, and race of patients. This paper examines how the diagnosis and treatment of insanity in the nineteenth-century asylums of New England were refracted through these categories of identity, and the consequent effects of this differentiation upon the everyday experiences of patients, with a particular focus on their recruitment into systems of institutional labor.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2019   •
• Constructing Bodies and Persons: Health and Medicine in Historic Social Context

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 182