Anyone know any good web sites regarding insane asylums in Victorian England. This is not about Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis, but rather how insane asylums were run, and what treatments were utilized.
Google “Bedlam.”
You might find Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary helpful.
My great grandfather was committed to an English lunatic asylum in 1892, and remained there until his death three years later.
I recently looked at his case notes, preserved at the county record office. It’s fairly clear that they had no idea what was wrong with him or how to treat him. Asylums in those days were more like prisons - their function was to keep the “lunatics” away from society rather than to treat them.
The Bethlem Royal Hospital Archives and Museum - on the current site in Beckenham - do have a website, but it’s mainly visiting information rather than online history. What survives of the Victorian period building in Lambeth now houses the main branch of the Imperial War Museum.
It concentrates on the earlier period and is not online, but Roy Porter’s 1987 book Mind-Forg’d Manacles is highly recommended as the classic study of 18th century English (and Dublin - thanks to Swift) institutions.
Google also “Kraepelin” and “Bleuler”. They weren’t from the UK but their work heavily influenced 19th Century institutional psychiatry throughout the western world.