The Confinement of the Insane: International Perspectives, 1800-1965 - Brief Article - Book Review

Contemporary Review, Jan, 2004

The Confinement of the Insane: International Perspectives, 1800-1965. Roy Porter and David Wright, editors. Cambridge University Press. [pounds sterling]50.00 and US$70.00. 371 pages. ISBN 0-521-80206-7. This collection of fourteen essays, by experts in Britain, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, South Africa, India, the U.S.

and Germany, contains three contributions that have been published in part whilst eleven are wholly original. The introduction is by Prof. Roy Porter, who sadly died in 2002. In it he surveys the current state of historical writing on the treatment of the mentally ill and shows how important it is to have a global perspective from which to understand the complex history. This global coverage is at the heart of these papers which begin with a study of the Robben Island Lunatic Asylum and ends with a survey of English asylums from 1800 to 1870. In between are chapters dealing with: asylums in Vaud and Geneva between 1900 and 1970; 'voluntary' committal in Paris between 1876 and 1914; asylums in Hamilton and Toronto between c. 1861 and 1891; the role of the police in committals in Victoria, Australia between 1848 and 1900; a study of Berlin's Wittenauer Heilstaetten asylum between 1919 and 1960; a survey of South Carolina's Lunatic Asylum and State Hospital from 1828 to 1920; the relationship between the state, the family and the insane in Japan from 1900 to 1945; the limits of reform in psychiatry in The Argentine from 1890 to 1946; mental health in revolutionary Mexico between 1910 and 1930; and psychiatry and confinement in India, in Nigeria and in Ireland. When put together these separate studies do give that new, comparative standpoint which is required to come to grips with this vital but confusing aspect of medical history. (E.G.Y.)