Thesis

Madness and gender in the nineteenth century : a case study of a Scottish asylum

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Awarding institution
  • University of Strathclyde
Date of award
  • 1995
Thesis identifier
  • T8341
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Abstract
  • Gender and the role it has played in the world of mental illness have been subjects for historians ever since the "second wave" of feminism in the 1970s, when women especially began to study what it meant to be female and insane. Studies of women and mental illness in the present led to studies of women and mental illness in the past, and in the 197 0s and 1980s historians began to analyse the role of gender in nineteenth century mental illness. In an attempt to continue this tradition, and to add needed data to the field of women and mental illness in the nineteenth century, this thesis discusses such literature and background history and analyses a heretofore unstudied population of patients from the Glasgow Royal Asylum in Gartnavel, Scotland. Using data collected from the admissions registers of two years, 1870 and 1880, I have described and attempted a statistical analysis of the patient population, especially with regards to gender. What were the characteristics of patients in the asylum? What was the typical age, occupation, level of education? What were the major causes of insanity, and what were the relationships between them and variables such as age, occupation, type of insanity, recovery rates, and gender? Did women and men differ from each other in terms of length of stay, death rate, and cause, and if so, why? How significant are these differences? In the end, I hope I have achieved a fairly thorough description and analysis of the patients, both male and female, at Gartnavel in these two years, and that I have successfully placed them within the larger framework of the 19th-century world.
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