SUMMARY The essay offers an analysis of the function and organization of the Commissioners in Lunacy from their inception to the passing of the Lunacy Consolidation Act of 1890. Adapting a model from John Harris’s British Government Inspection (1955), I have provided a discussion of the manner in which the Commissioners interpreted and implemented the lunacy laws - concentrating on the routine of administration - and of the relationships between the Board and the medical profession and the poor law authorities. In establishing the Commissioners in Lunacy within the wider context of lunacy “reform” I suggest that the law, as mediated by the Board, was the key formative factor in delineating the conceptual and real dimensions of the asylum system, and that the Commissioners, therefore, were crucial in legitimating a medical model of insanity and in perpetuating medical hegemony of institutions whose primary purpose was social control.
“A hospital where the sane are locked up for their madness and the cynical serve the state by acquiescing.”
- Anton Chekhov’s “Ward No. 6”
Thank you, I will take a look. I found this lecture (about 50 minutes long) about the writings of Anton Chekhov to be most illuminating:
Anton Chekhov and The Social Origins of Mental Illness