Tuesday 8 November 2022 18:00
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20:00
Huxley Building Room 140
Guest Lecture
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History
Our first talk of the year: Containment? Community? Cure? A Brief History of the Asylum in Britain by Dr Jennifer Wallis
Asked to picture a 19th-century lunatic asylum, many of us will imagine dark cells and straitjackets, perhaps macabre anatomical investigations or patients cruelly treated by attendants. In this talk Dr Jennifer Wallis will take us on a brief tour of the asylum in Britain to demonstrate that the reality of these institutions was complex and varied, encompassing care and community as well as containment. Using photographs, casebooks, and other historical materials, we will explore patient and staff experiences of the asylum to chart the changing fortunes of these institutions. From the optimism of early 19th-century reformers to the more pessimistic outlook of late 19th-century psychiatrists faced with rising numbers of chronic patients, we will see that perceptions of the asylum and its functions have been in almost constant flux throughout the last 200 years.
Dr Jennifer Wallis is a Medical Humanities Teaching Fellow, and Lecturer in the History of Science and Medicine, at Imperial College London. Her publications include Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum (2017) and the co-authored Anxious Times: Medicine & Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2019).
Hope to see many of you there 6.00 Huxley Room 140
Asked to picture a 19th-century lunatic asylum, many of us will imagine dark cells and straitjackets, perhaps macabre anatomical investigations or patients cruelly treated by attendants. In this talk Dr Jennifer Wallis will take us on a brief tour of the asylum in Britain to demonstrate that the reality of these institutions was complex and varied, encompassing care and community as well as containment. Using photographs, casebooks, and other historical materials, we will explore patient and staff experiences of the asylum to chart the changing fortunes of these institutions. From the optimism of early 19th-century reformers to the more pessimistic outlook of late 19th-century psychiatrists faced with rising numbers of chronic patients, we will see that perceptions of the asylum and its functions have been in almost constant flux throughout the last 200 years.
Dr Jennifer Wallis is a Medical Humanities Teaching Fellow, and Lecturer in the History of Science and Medicine, at Imperial College London. Her publications include Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum (2017) and the co-authored Anxious Times: Medicine & Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2019).
Hope to see many of you there 6.00 Huxley Room 140