Tag: Insane Asylum

Who was Elizabeth Packard (1816-1897)?

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Introduction

Elizabeth Parsons Ware Packard (28 December 1816 to 25 July 1897), also known as E.P.W. Packard, was an American advocate for the rights of women and people accused of insanity. She was wrongfully committed to an insane asylum by her husband, who claimed that she had been insane for more than three years. At her trial, however, a jury concluded that she was not insane after only seven minutes of deliberation. She later founded the Anti-Insane Asylum Society, campaigning for divorced women to retain custody of their children.

Life

Elizabeth Packard

Elizabeth Packard, born in Ware, Massachusetts, was the oldest of three children and the only daughter of Samuel and Lucy Ware. Samuel was a Congregational minister in the Connecticut Valley of the Ware Congregational Church from 1810 to 1826. She was educated at the Amherst Female Seminary, where she studied French, algebra, and the new classics, thanks to the “adequate wealth” of her parents. In 1835, at age 19, she was diagnosed with brain fever, a nineteenth-century term for an illness thought to be caused by a severe emotional upset. When the family physician failed to help her, Samuel Ware decided to admit her to Worcester State Hospital, with Dr. Samuel Woodard at the helm; he was highly regarded for patient care. On the admission papers, Samuel Ware wrote that she suffered from “mental labor” from her occupation as a teacher. She remained in the hospital for six weeks.

At the insistence of her parents, Ware married Calvinist minister Theophilus Packard, fourteen years her senior and said to be “cold and domineering”, on 21 May 1839. The couple had six children: Theophilus (b. 1842), Ira Ware (b. 1844), Samuel Ware (b. 1847), Elizabeth Ware (b. 1850), George Hastings (b. 1853), and Arthur Dwight (b. 1858). They lived in Western Massachusetts until September 1854. Beginning in 1857, after having lived in Ohio and Iowa for short periods, the family moved to Manteno, Illinois, and appeared to have a peaceful and uneventful marriage.

Theophilus, however, held quite decisive religious beliefs. After many years of marriage, Elizabeth Packard outwardly questioned her husband’s beliefs and began expressing opinions that were contrary to his. While the main subject of their dispute was religion, the couple also disagreed on methods of child rearing and managing family finances, as well as the morality of slavery, with Elizabeth defending abolitionist John Brown, which embarrassed Theophilus.

When Illinois opened its first hospital for the mentally ill in 1851, the state legislature passed a law that within two years of its passage was amended to require a public hearing before a person could be committed against their will with the exception that a husband could have his wife committed without either a public hearing or her consent. In 1860, Theophilus Packard judged that his wife was “slightly insane”, a condition he attributed to “excessive application of body and mind”. He arranged for a doctor, J.W. Brown, to speak with her. The doctor pretended to be a sewing machine salesman. During their conversation, Elizabeth complained of her husband’s domination and his accusations to others that she was insane. Brown reported this conversation to Theophilus (along with the observation that Mrs. Packard “exhibited a great dislike to me”). Theophilus decided to have Elizabeth committed. She learned of this decision on 18 June 1860, when the county sheriff arrived at the Packard home to take her into custody.

Elizabeth Packard spent the next three years at the Jacksonville Insane Asylum in Jacksonville, Illinois (now the Jacksonville Developmental Centre). She was regularly questioned by doctors, but refused to agree that she was insane or to change her religious views. In June 1863, due, in part, to pressure from her children, who wished her to be released, the doctors declared that she was incurable and discharged her. Upon her discharge, Theophilus locked her in the nursery of their home and nailed the windows shut. Elizabeth managed to drop a letter complaining of this treatment out of the window, which was delivered to her friend Sarah Haslett. Sarah Haslett in turn delivered the letter to Judge Charles Starr, who issued a writ of habeas corpus ordering Theophilus to bring Elizabeth to his chambers to discuss the matter. After being presented with Theophilus’ evidence, Judge Starr scheduled a jury trial to allow a legal determination of Elizabeth’s sanity to take place.

Packard v. Packard

At the subsequent trial of Packard v. Packard, which lasted five days, Theophilus’s lawyers produced witnesses from his family who testified that Elizabeth had argued with her husband and tried to withdraw from his congregation. These witnesses concurred with Theophilus that this was a sign of insanity. The record from the Illinois State Hospital stating that Mrs. Packard’s condition was incurable was also entered into the court record.

Elizabeth’s lawyers, Stephen Moore and John W. Orr, responded by calling witnesses from the neighbourhood who knew the Packards but were not members of Theophilus’ church. These witnesses testified they never saw Elizabeth exhibit any signs of insanity, while discussing religion or otherwise. The final witness was Dr. Duncanson, who was both a physician and a theologian. Dr. Duncanson had interviewed Elizabeth and he testified that while not necessarily in agreement with all her religious beliefs, she was sane in his view, arguing that “I do not call people insane because they differ with me. I pronounce her a sane woman and wish we had a nation of such women.”

The jury deliberated for only seven minutes before deciding the case in Elizabeth’s favour. She was legally declared sane, and Judge Charles Starr, who had changed the trial from one about habeas corpus to one about sanity, issued an order that she should not be confined. As scholar Kathryn Burns-Howard described it, “we will never know Elizabeth’s true mental state or the details of her family life.”

Life after the Trial

When Elizabeth Packard returned to the home she shared with her husband in Manteno, Illinois, she found that the night before her release, her husband had rented their home to another family, sold her furniture, had taken her money, notes, wardrobe and children, and had left the state. She appealed to the Supreme Courts of both Illinois and Massachusetts, to where her husband had taken her children, but had no legal recourse, as married women in these states at the time had no legal rights to their property or children (refer to the term Coverture). As such, the Anti-Insane Asylum Society was formed.

Packard did not return to her former life, but became a national celebrity, publishing “an armload of books and criss-crossing the United States on a decades-long reform campaign”, not only advocating for married women’s rights and freedom of speech, but speaking out against “the power of insane asylums”. She became what some scholars call “a publicist and lobbyist for better insanity laws”. As scholar Kathryn Burns-Howard has argued, Packard reinvented herself in this role, earning enough to support her children and even her estranged husband, from whom she remained separated for the rest of her life. Ultimately, moderate supporters of women’s rights in the northern United States embraced her. Some argued that in the midst of the Civil War that a country in the midst of freeing slaves should do the same for others who suffered from abusive husbands. Some argue that she seemed oblivious to her racial prejudice in arguing that White women had a “moral and spiritual nature” and suffered more “spiritual agony” than formerly enslaved African-Americans. Even so, others say that her story provided “a stirring example of oppressed womanhood” that others did not.

Packard petitioned the Illinois and Massachusetts legislatures, and in 1869 legislation was passed in those states allowing married women equal rights to property and custody of their children. Upon the passing of this legislation, Packard’s husband voluntarily ceded custody of their children back to her, and her children came to live with her in Chicago.

Packard realized how narrow her legal victory had been, and that the underlying social principles which had led to her confinement still existed. She founded the Anti-Insane Asylum Society and published several books, including Marital Power Exemplified, or Three Years Imprisonment for Religious Belief (1864), Great Disclosure of Spiritual Wickedness in High Places (1865), The Mystic Key or the Asylum Secret Unlocked (1866), and The Prisoners’ Hidden Life, Or Insane Asylums Unveiled (1868). In 1867, the State of Illinois passed a “Bill for the Protection of Personal Liberty” which guaranteed that all people accused of insanity, including wives, had the right to a public hearing, as did Massachusetts.

Packard also saw similar laws passed in three other states. Even so, she was strongly attacked by medical professionals and anonymous citizens, unlike others such as Dorothea Dix, with her former doctor from the Jacksonville Insane Asylum, Dr. Andrew McFarland, who privately called her “a sort of Joan D’Arc in the matter of stirring up the personal prejudices”. As such, Elizabeth’s work on this front was “broadly unappreciated” while she was alive. She only received broader recognition, starting in the 1930s, by a well-known historian of mental illness, Albert Deutsch, and again in the 1960s from those who were “attacking the medical model of insanity”.

She died on 25 July 1897. In her obituary, The Inter Ocean described her as “the reformer of insane asylum methods”

Scholarship and Legacy

Scholars have written various books and articles about Elizabeth Packard. This has included articles by scholars Myra Samuels Himelhoch and Arthur H. Shaffer in 1979, Paul A. Lombardo in 1992, and Jennifer Rebecca Levinson in 2003. In 1991, Barbara Sapinsley wrote the first book which focused on Elizabeth Packard, entitled The Private War of Mrs. Packard. It was informed by Packard’s family in the late 1960s/early 1970s, and took 20 years to find a publisher. Linda V. Carlisle wrote another biography, published by University of Illinois Press in 2010, entitled Elizabeth Packard: A Noble Fight. In part, she focuses on individual legislation that Packard campaigned for and/or helped bring about. In 2021, Kate Moore wrote a detailed and highly researched story highlighting the character of kindness, service, and perseverance of Elizabeth Packard entitled The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear. Previously, in 2005, Barbara Hambly had referred to Elizabeth Packard, in some detail, in her novel on the insanity of Mary Todd Lincoln, entitled The Emancipator’s Wife: A Novel of Mary Todd Lincoln, since the 1867 law Packard advocated for required a jury trial for anyone who was “committed to an insane asylum.” Moore would later say that Packard was not mentally ill and was “merely independent,” and argued that people should “take inspiration from women like Elizabeth.” Troy Rondinone, a professor at Southern Connecticut State University, made a similar argument, arguing that people should remember “Packard’s battle for women in the mental health care system.”

Emily Mann wrote the play Mrs. Packard, which premiered in May 2007. In Mann’s play, Packard describes her life fully in the insane asylum; it is considered historically accurate.

On 10 August 2023, Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker renamed the mental health hospital in Springfield Illinois from Andrew McFarland Mental Health Centre to the Elizabeth Packard Mental Health Centre, in Packard’s honour.

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On This Day … 12 October [2022]

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Events

  • 1773 – America’s first insane asylum opens.

People (Births)

  • 1925 – Denis Lazure, Canadian psychiatrist and politician (d. 2008).
  • 1929 – Robert Coles, American psychologist, author, and academic.

People (Deaths)

  • 1948 – Susan Sutherland Isaacs, English psychologist and psychoanalyst (b. 1885).

Eastern State Hospital (Virginia)

Eastern State Hospital is a psychiatric hospital in Williamsburg, Virginia. Built in 1773, it was the first public facility in the present-day United States constructed solely for the care and treatment of the mentally ill. The original building had burned but was reconstructed in 1985.

Denis Lazure

Denis Lazure (12 October 1925 to 23 February 2008) was a Canadian psychiatrist and politician. Lazure was a Member of the National Assembly of Quebec (MNA) from 1976 to 1984 and from 1989 to 1996. He is the father of actress Gabrielle Lazure.

Robert Coles

Robert Coles (born 12 October 1929) is an American author, child psychiatrist, and professor emeritus at Harvard University.

Coles originally intended to become a teacher or professor, but as part of his senior honours thesis, he interviewed the poet and physician William Carlos Williams, who promptly persuaded him to go into medicine. He studied medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, graduating in 1954. After residency training at the University of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois (the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine), Coles moved on to psychiatric residencies at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, and McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts (the two hospitals are affiliates of Harvard University and the Harvard University Medical School in Cambridge, Massachusetts).

Knowing that he was to be called into the US Armed Forces under the Doctor Draft, Coles joined the Air Force in 1958 and was assigned the rank of captain. His field of specialisation was psychiatry, his intention eventually to sub-specialise in child psychiatry. He served as chief of neuropsychiatric services at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi, and was honorably discharged in 1960. He returned to Boston and finished his child psychiatry training at the Children’s Hospital. In July 1960, he was married to Jane Hollowell, and the couple moved to New Orleans.

Susan Sutherland Isaacs

Susan Sutherland Isaacs, CBE (née Fairhurst; 24 May 1885 to 12 October 1948; also known as Ursula Wise) was a Lancashire-born educational psychologist and psychoanalyst. She published studies on the intellectual and social development of children and promoted the nursery school movement. For Isaacs, the best way for children to learn was by developing their independence. She believed that the most effective way to achieve this was through play, and that the role of adults and early educators was to guide children’s play.

On This Day … 14 August

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People (Births)

  • 1840 – Richard von Krafft-Ebing, German-Austrian psychologist and author (d. 1902).

Richard von Krafft-Ebing

Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing (full name Richard Fridolin Joseph Freiherr Krafft von Festenberg auf Frohnberg, genannt von Ebing; 1840-1902) was an Austro-German psychiatrist and author of the foundational work Psychopathia Sexualis (1886).

Life

Krafft-Ebing was born in 1840 in Mannheim, Germany, studied medicine at the University of Heidelberg, where he specialized in psychiatry. He later practiced in psychiatric asylums. After leaving his work in asylums, he pursued a career in psychiatry, forensics, and hypnosis.

He died in Graz in 1902. He was recognized as an authority on deviant sexual behaviour and its medicolegal aspects.

Principal Work

Krafft-Ebing’s principal work is Psychopathia Sexualis: eine Klinisch-Forensische Studie (Sexual Psychopathy: A Clinical-Forensic Study), which was first published in 1886 and expanded in subsequent editions. The last edition from the hand of the author (the twelfth) contained a total of 238 case histories of human sexual behaviour.

Translations of various editions of this book introduced to English such terms as “sadist” (derived from the brutal sexual practices depicted in the novels of the Marquis de Sade), “masochist”, (derived from the name of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch), “homosexuality”, “bisexuality”, “necrophilia”, and “anilingus”.

Psychopathia Sexualis is a forensic reference book for psychiatrists, physicians, and judges. Written in an academic style, its introduction noted that, to discourage lay readers, the author had deliberately chosen a scientific term for the title of the book and that he had written parts of it in Latin for the same purpose.

Psychopathia Sexualis was one of the first books about sexual practices that studied homosexuality/bisexuality. It proposed consideration of the mental state of sex criminals in legal judgements of their crimes. During its time, it became the leading medico-legal textual authority on sexual pathology.

The twelfth and final edition of Psychopathia Sexualis presented four categories of what Krafft-Ebing called “cerebral neuroses”:

  • Paradoxia, sexual excitement occurring independently of the period of the physiological processes in the generative organs.
  • Anaesthesia, absence of sexual instinct.
  • Hyperaesthesia, increased desire, satyriasis.
  • Paraesthesia, perversion of the sexual instinct, i.e., excitability of the sexual functions to inadequate stimuli.

The term “hetero-sexual” is used, but not in chapter or section headings. The term “bi-sexuality” appears twice in the 7th edition, and more frequently in the 12th.

There is no mention of sexual activity with children in Chapter III, General Pathology, where the “cerebral neuroses” (including sexuality the paraesthesias) are covered. Various sexual acts with children are mentioned in Chapter IV, Special Pathology, but always in the context of specific mental disorders, such as dementia, epilepsy, and paranoia, never as resulting from its own disorder. However, Chapter V on sexual crimes has a section on sexual crimes with children. This section is brief in the 7th edition, but is expanded in the 12th to cover Non-Psychopathological Cases and Psychopathological Cases, in which latter subsection the term paedophilia erotica is used.

Krafft-Ebing considered procreation the purpose of sexual desire and that any form of recreational sex was a perversion of the sex drive. “With opportunity for the natural satisfaction of the sexual instinct, every expression of it that does not correspond with the purpose of nature—i.e., propagation,—must be regarded as perverse.” Hence, he concluded that homosexuals suffered a degree of sexual perversion because homosexual practices could not result in procreation. In some cases, homosexual libido was classified as a moral vice induced by the early practice of masturbation. Krafft-Ebing proposed a theory of homosexuality as biologically anomalous and originating in the embryonic and fetal stages of gestation, which evolved into a “sexual inversion” of the brain. In 1901, in an article in the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (Yearbook for Intermediate Sexual Types), he changed the biological term from anomaly to differentiation.

Although the primary focus is on sexual behaviour in men, there are sections on Sadism in Woman, Masochism in Woman, and Lesbian Love. Several of the cases of sexual activity with children were committed by women.

Krafft-Ebing’s conclusions about homosexuality are now largely forgotten, partly because Sigmund Freud’s theories were more interesting to physicians (who considered homosexuality to be a psychological problem) and partly because he incurred the enmity of the Austrian Catholic Church when he psychologically associated martyrdom (a desire for sanctity) with hysteria and masochism.

Works

A bibliography of von Krafft-Ebing’s writings can be found in A. Kreuter, Deutschsprachige Neurologen und Psychiater, München 1996, Band 2, pp.767-774.

  • Die Melancholie: Eine klinische Studie (1874) OCLC 180728044.
  • Grundzüge der Kriminalpsychologie für Juristen (second edition, 1882) OCLC 27460358.
  • Psychopathia Sexualis: eine Klinisch-Forensische Studie (first edition, 1886).
  • Die progressive allgemeine Paralyse (1894) OCLC 65980497.
  • Nervosität und neurasthenische Zustände (1895) OCLC 9633149.

Translations

  • Domino Falls translated and edited Psychopathia Sexualis:The Case Histories (1997) ISBN 978-0-9820464-7-0.
  • Charles Gilbert Chaddock translated four of Krafft-Ebing’s books into English:
    • An Experimental Study in the Domain of Hypnotism (New York and London, 1889).
    • Psychosis Menstrualis (1902).
    • Psychopathia Sexualis (twelfth edition, 1903).
    • Text Book of Insanity (1905).

What was the Erwadi Fire Incident (2001)?

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Introduction

Erwadi fire incident is an accident that occurred on 06 August 2001, when 28 inmates of a faith-based mental asylum died in the fire. All these inmates were bound by chains at Moideen Badusha Mental Home in Erwadi Village in Tamil Nadu.

Large number of mental homes existed in Erwadi which was famous for the dargah of Quthbus Sultan Syed Ibrahim Shaheed Valiyullah, from Medina, Saudi Arabia who came to India to propagate Islam. Various people believe that holy water from the dargah and oil from the lamp burning there have the power to cure all illnesses, especially mental problems. The treatment also included frequent caning, beatings supposedly to “drive away the evil”. During the day, patients were tied to trees with thick ropes. At night, they were tied to their beds with iron chains. The patients awaited a divine command in their dreams to go back home. For the command to come, it was expected to take anything from two months to several years.

As the number of people seeking cure at dargah increased, homes were set up by individuals to reportedly take care of the patients. Most of these homes were set up by people who themselves had come to Erwadi seeking cure for their relatives.

The origins of the fire are unknown, but once it spread, there was little hope of saving most of the 45 inmates, who were chained to their beds in the ramshackle shelter in which they slept, though such shackling was against Indian law. Some inmates whose shackles were not as tight escaped, and five people were hospitalised for severe burns. The bodies of the dead were not identifiable.

Aftermath and Legacy

All mental homes of this type were closed on 13 August 2001, and more than 500 inmates were placed under government’s care. As per Supreme Court directions, a commission headed by N. Ramdas was set up to enquire into these deaths. The commission recommended that care of mentally ill people is to be improved, that anybody wishing to set up a mental home to acquire a license, and that all inmates be unchained.

In 2007, the owner of the Badsha Home for the Mentally Challenged, his wife and two relatives were sentenced to seven years imprisonment by a magistrate Court.

What was the Alleged Lunatics’ Friend Society?

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Introduction

The Alleged Lunatics’ Friend Society was an advocacy group started by former asylum patients and their supporters in 19th-century Britain.

The Society campaigned for greater protection against wrongful confinement or cruel and improper treatment, and for reform of the lunacy laws. The Society is recognised today as a pioneer of the psychiatric survivors movement.

Background

There was concern in the United Kingdom in the 19th century about wrongful confinement in private madhouses, or asylums, and the mistreatment of patients, with tales of such abuses appearing in newspapers and magazines. The Madhouses Act 1774 had introduced a process of certification and a system for licensing and inspecting private madhouses, but had been ineffectual in reducing abuses or allaying public anxiety. Doctors in the 19th century were establishing themselves as arbiters of sanity but were reliant on subjective diagnoses and tended to equate insanity with eccentric or immoral behaviour. Public suspicion of their motives was also aroused by the profits that were made from private madhouses.

In 1838, Richard Paternoster, a former civil servant in the East India Company, was discharged after 41 days in a London madhouse (William Finch’s madhouse at Kensington House) having been detained following a disagreement with his father over money. Once free, he published, via his solicitors, a letter in The Times announcing his release. The letter was read by John Perceval, a son of prime minister Spencer Perceval. Perceval had spent three years in two of the most expensive private asylums in England, Brislington House in Bristol, run by Quaker Edward Long Fox, and Ticehurst Asylum in Sussex. His treatment had been brutal in the Brislington House; at Ticehurst the regime was more humane but his release had been delayed. Perceval contacted Paternoster and they were soon joined by several former patients and others:

  • William Bailey (an inventor and business man who had spent several years in madhouses);
  • Lewis Phillips (a glassware manufacturer who had been incarcerated in Thomas Warburton’s asylum);
  • John Parkin (a surgeon and former asylum patient);
  • Captain Richard Saumarez (whose father was the surgeon Richard Saumarez and whose two brothers were Chancery lunatics); and
  • Luke James Hansard (a philanthropist from the family of parliamentary printers).

This group was to form the core of the Alleged Lunatics’ Friend Society, although the Society would not be formally founded until 1845.

The group began their campaign by sending letters to the press, lobbying Members of Parliament (MPs) and government officials, and publishing pamphlets. John Perceval was elected to the Board of Poor Law Guardians in the parish of Kensington (although he was opposed to the New Poor Law) and was able to join magistrates on their visits of inspection to asylums. Richard Paternoster and Lewis Phillips brought court cases against the people who had incarcerated them. John Perceval published two books about his experience. Richard Paternoster wrote a series of articles for The Satirist magazine; these were published in 1841 as a book called The Madhouse System.

Formation

On 07 July 1845, Richard Paternoster, John Perceval and a number of others formed the Alleged Lunatics’ Friend Society. A pamphlet published in March the following year set out the aims with which the Society was founded:

At a meeting of several Gentlemen feeling deeply interested in behalf of their fellow-creatures, subjected to confinement as lunatic patients.

It was unanimously resolved:… That this Society is formed for the protection of the British subject from unjust confinement, on the grounds of mental derangement, and for the redress of persons so confined; also for the protection of all persons confined as lunatic patients from cruel and improper treatment. That this Society will receive applications from persons complaining of being unjustly treated, or from their friends, aid them in obtaining legal advice, and otherwise assist and afford them all proper protection.

That the Society will endeavour to procure a reform in the laws and treatment affecting the arrest, detention, and release of persons treated as of unsound mind…

John Perceval was listed as the honorary secretary, Luke James Hansard as treasurer, and Henry F. Richardson as honorary solicitor (Gilbert Bolden would later become the Society’s lawyer). Sixteen vice-presidents included both Tory and Liberal MPs; notable amongst them was the radical MP for Finsbury, Thomas Duncombe. New legislation, championed by Lord Ashley, was being introduced in parliament (the Lunacy Act 1845 and County Asylums Act 1845) and the creation of a formal society put the group in a better position to influence legislators. Four days after the Society was founded Thomas Duncombe spoke in the House of Commons, arguing for the postponement of new legislation pending a select committee of inquiry, and detailing a number of cases of wrongful confinement that had come to the Society’s attention. The legislation however went ahead, and the Society would have to wait until 1859 for an inquiry, although the Society’s supporters in parliament managed to secure a number of clauses to safeguard patients in the 1845 Act.

Although the Society had influential supporters such as Thomas Duncombe and Thomas Wakley (surgeon, radical MP for Finsbury and coroner), they did not gain widespread public support, probably never having more than sixty members and relying upon their own money for funding. A critical article in The Times of 1846 revealed the views and prejudices that the Society would have to counter:

“We can scarcely understand what such a society can propose to accomplish… There have been, no doubt, many cases of grievous oppression in which actual lunatics have been treated with cruelty, and those who are only alleged to be insane have been most unlawfully imprisoned… These, however, are evils to be checked by the law and not tampered with… by a body of private individuals… Some of the names we have seen announced suggest to us the possibility that the promoters of this scheme are not altogether free from motives of self-preservation. There is no objection to a set of gentlemen joining together in this manner for their own protection… but we think they should be satisfied to take care of themselves, without tendering their services to all who happen to be in the same position.”

John Perceval replied that the law afforded patients insufficient protection, and that the Society existed to give legal advice to individuals and draw the government’s attention to abuses as well as to encourage a more general discussion about the nature of insanity. In response to the article’s reference to the fact that several members of the Society had been patients in asylums, Perceval had this to say:

“I would remind the writer of that article, that men are worthy of confidence in the province of their own experience, and as the wisest and best of mankind hold the tenure of their health and reasoning faculties on the will of an Inscrutable Providence, and great wits to madness are allied, he will do well to consider that their fate may be his own, and to assist them in saving others in future from like injustice and cruelties, which the ignorance of the fondest relations may expose patients to, as well as the malice of their enemies.”

Social worker Nicholas Hervey, who has written the most extensive history of the Alleged Lunatics’ Friend Society, suggested that a number of factors may have contributed to the lack of wider public support, namely: alignment with radical political circles; endorsement of localist views, rather than support of the Lunacy Commission’s centralism; fearless exposure of upper-class sensibilities regarding privacy on matters concerning insanity, thus alienating wealthy potential supporters; attacks on the new forms of moral treatment in asylums (what John Perceval referred to as “repression by mildness and coaxing”).

Achievements

As well as lobbying parliament and campaigning through the media and public meetings, during the next twenty years or so the Society took up the cases of at least seventy patients, including he following examples:

  • Dr Edward Peithman was a German tutor who had been falsely imprisoned in Bethlem Hospital for fourteen years after he had tried to gain access to Prince Albert.
    • John Perceval took up his case and, after the Commissioners in Lunacy released him in February 1854, took him home with him to Herne Bay.
    • Dr Peithman promptly tried to speak to Prince Albert again, and was committed to Hanwell Asylum.
    • Again Perceval obtained his release, this time escorting him back to Germany.
  • Jane Bright was a member of a wealthy Leicestershire family, the Brights of Skeffington Hall.
    • She was seduced by a doctor who took most of her money and left her pregnant. Soon after the birth of her child, her brothers had her committed to Northampton Hospital.
    • On her release she enlisted Gilbert Bolden, the Society’s solicitor, to help her recover the remains of her fortune from her family.
  • Anne Tottenham was a Chancery lunatic who was removed from the garden of Effra Hall Asylum in Brixton by Admiral Saumarez.
    • This course of action was a rare exception to the Society’s more usual rule of following legal routes to secure the release of patients who had been wrongly confined.
  • Charles Verity was serving a two-year prison sentence when he was transferred to Northampton Hospital. He contacted John Perceval in 1857 about abuses in the refractory ward and the Society secured an inquiry.
    • The Commissioners in Lunacy reported in 1858 that charges of cruelty and ill-usage had been established against attendants and the culprits had been dismissed.

Not all the Society’s cases were successful:

  • James Hill (father of Octavia Hill) was a Wisbech corn merchant, banker, proprietor of the newspaper the Star of the East and founder of the United Advancement Society.
    • He had been declared bankrupt and had been committed to Kensington House Asylum.
    • After his release in 1851 the Society helped him sue the proprietor of Kensington House, Dr Francis Philps, for wrongful confinement but the case was unsuccessful.
  • Captain Arthur Childe, son of William Lacon Childe, MP, of Kinlet Hall in Shropshire, was a Chancery lunatic who had been found to be of unsound mind by a lunacy inquisition in 1854.
    • The Society applied on his behalf for another lunacy inquisition in 1855, claiming he was now of sound mind.
    • The Society was unsuccessful; the jury found Captain Childe to be of unsound mind and there was a quarrel about costs.

The Society was successful in drawing attention to abuses in a number of asylums. Notable amongst these was Bethlem Hospital, which, as a charitable institution, had been exempt from inspection under the 1845 Lunacy Act. The help of the Society was enlisted by patients and they persuaded the home secretary to allow the Commissioners in Lunacy to inspect the asylum. The Commissioner’s critical report in 1852 led to reforms. Together with magistrate Purnell Bransby Purnell, the Society ran a campaign to expose abuses in asylums in Gloucestershire.

One of the aims of the Society had always been to persuade parliament to conduct a committee of inquiry into the lunacy laws. This, after numerous petitions, they finally achieved in 1859. John Perceval, Admiral Saumarez, Gilbert Bolden and Anne Tottenham (a patient they had rescued from Effra House Asylum) gave evidence to the committee. The results were disappointing; the committee made a number of recommendations in their 1860 report but these were not put into place.

Legacy

The Society’s activities appear to have come to an end in 1860s. Admiral Saumarez died in 1866, and Gilbert Bolden had a young family and moved to Birmingham. In 1862 John Perceval wrote a letter to the magazine John Bull:

“I am sorry to say that this Society is so little supported, in spite of the great good it has done, and is in consequence so entirely disorganised, that I have repeatedly proposed to the committee that we should agree to a dissolution of it, and I have only consented to continue acting with them, and to lend my name to what is rather a myth than a reality, from their representation that however insignificant we were, we had still been able to effect a great deal of good, and might still be further successful…”

Nicholas Hervey concluded:

“The Society’s importance lies in the wide panorama of ideas it laid before Shaftesbury’s Board. Unrestrained by the traditions of bureaucratic office, it was free to explore a variety of alternatives for care of the insane, many of which were too visionary or impolitic to stand a chance of implementation. The difficulty it faced was the blinkered perspective of the Commission and of Shaftesbury in particular… it would not be an exaggeration of the Society’s worth to say that patients’ rights, asylum care, and medical accountability all suffered with its demise in the 1860s.”

The cause for lunacy law reform was taken up by Louisa Lowe’s Lunacy Law Reform Association, whose aims were very similar to those of the Alleged Lunatics’ Friend Society. In more recent years the Society has been recognised as a pioneer of advocacy and the psychiatric survivors movement.

What was the Board of Control for Lunacy and Mental Deficiency?

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Introduction

The Board of Control for Lunacy and Mental Deficiency was a body overseeing the treatment of the mentally ill in England and Wales.

Background

It was created by the Mental Deficiency Act 1913 to replace the Commissioners in Lunacy, under the Home Office however it was independent in that it reported to the Lord Chancellor who had responsibility for investigating breaches of care and integrity. The Board was transferred to the Ministry of Health by the Ministry of Health Act 1919, and reorganised in 1930.

The Board consisted of a Chairman, two Senior Medical Commissioners, one Senior Legal Commissioner, six Commissioners including lawyers and doctors, six Inspectors and administrative staff. By law, at least one of these had to be a woman. The Commissioners of the Board travelled around England and Wales ensuring that those detained under mental health legislation were legally in custody, their care was appropriate, and moneys and other properties owned by patients were not being misused or stolen.

The Board was based in Northumberland Avenue, London, until 1939 when it was moved to Hobart House, Grosvenor Place.

Its functions were transferred to the Minister of Health by the National Health Service Act 1946.

Refer to Chronology of UK Mental Health Legislation, Commissioners in Lunacy, Commissioners in Lunacy for Scotland, and Commissioners in Lunacy for Ireland.

Members

Announcements of members were carried in the major national newspapers, including The Times.

  • On inception of the Board in 1913, the chairman was Sir William Byrne with Arthur Rotherham and Mary Dendy joining the ex officio members of the previous Lunacy Commissioners; C.H. Bond, Marriott Cooke, S. Coupland, B.T. Hodgson, S.J.F. MacLeod, F. Needham L.L. Shadwell, and A.H. Trevor.
  • In 1916, due to Sir William Byrne moving on, Marriott Cooke became acting chairman, and Robert Welsh Braithwaite was appointed to the board.
  • In 1921, Dr Ruth Darwin was appointed to the Board
  • In 1926 due to Robert Welsh Braithwaite’s retirement, Robert Cunyngham Brown was appointed a commissioner.
  • In 1928, due to the retirement of the chairman, Sir Frederick Willis, Laurence George Brock was appointed chairman.
  • In 1929, Dr Bedford Pierce was appointed a commissioner.
  • From the start of 1931, the Board was reconstituted, with a chairman and four other members.
    • L.G. Brock continued as chairman, with S.J. Fraser MacLeod, C. Hubert Bond, Arthur Rotherham, Ellen Pinsent.
  • William Rees-Thomas was appointed to the Board in 1931.
  • In 1931, Dr Isabel Wilson was appointed as a Commissioner, holding the position until 1948.
    • From 1949 to 1960 she was a Senior Commissioner, after which the Board was abolished and her position was changed to the Principal Medical Officer, Ministry of Health.

On This Day … 22 December

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People (Deaths)

  • 1902 – Richard von Krafft-Ebing, German-Austrian psychiatrist and author (b. 1840).

Richard von Krafft-Ebing

Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902; full name Richard Fridolin Joseph Freiherr Krafft von Festenberg auf Frohnberg, genannt von Ebing) was an Austro–German psychiatrist and author of the foundational work Psychopathia Sexualis (1886).

Life

Krafft-Ebing was born in 1840 in Mannheim, Germany, studied medicine at the University of Heidelberg, where he specialised in psychiatry. He later practiced in psychiatric asylums. After leaving his work in asylums, he pursued a career in psychiatry, forensics, and hypnosis.

He died in Graz in 1902. He was recognised as an authority on deviant sexual behaviour and its medicolegal aspects.

Principal Work

Krafft-Ebing’s principal work is Psychopathia Sexualis: eine Klinisch-Forensische Studie (Sexual Psychopathy: A Clinical-Forensic Study), which was first published in 1886 and expanded in subsequent editions. The last edition from the hand of the author (the twelfth) contained a total of 238 case histories of human sexual behaviour.

Translations of various editions of this book introduced to English such terms as “sadist” (derived from the brutal sexual practices depicted in the novels of the Marquis de Sade), “masochist”, (derived from the name of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch), “homosexuality”, “bisexuality”, “necrophilia”, and “anilingus”.

Psychopathia Sexualis is a forensic reference book for psychiatrists, physicians, and judges. Written in an academic style, its introduction noted that, to discourage lay readers, the author had deliberately chosen a scientific term for the title of the book and that he had written parts of it in Latin for the same purpose.

Psychopathia Sexualis was one of the first books about sexual practices that studied homosexuality/bisexuality. It proposed consideration of the mental state of sex criminals in legal judgements of their crimes. During its time, it became the leading medico–legal textual authority on sexual pathology.

The twelfth and final edition of Psychopathia Sexualis presented four categories of what Krafft-Ebing called “cerebral neuroses”:

  • Paradoxia, sexual excitement occurring independently of the period of the physiological processes in the generative organs.
  • Anaesthesia, absence of sexual instinct.
  • Hyperaesthesia, increased desire, satyriasis.
  • Paraesthesia, perversion of the sexual instinct, i.e., excitability of the sexual functions to inadequate stimuli.

The term “hetero-sexual” is used, but not in chapter or section headings. The term “bi-sexuality” appears twice in the 7th edition, and more frequently in the 12th.

There is no mention of sexual activity with children in Chapter III, General Pathology, where the “cerebral neuroses” (including sexuality the paraesthesia’s) are covered. Various sexual acts with children are mentioned in Chapter IV, Special Pathology, but always in the context of specific mental disorders, such as dementia, epilepsy, and paranoia, never as resulting from its own disorder. However, Chapter V on sexual crimes has a section on sexual crimes with children. This section is brief in the 7th edition, but is expanded in the 12th to cover Non-Psychopathological Cases and Psychopathological Cases, in which latter subsection the term paedophilia erotica is used.

Krafft-Ebing considered procreation the purpose of sexual desire and that any form of recreational sex was a perversion of the sex drive. “With opportunity for the natural satisfaction of the sexual instinct, every expression of it that does not correspond with the purpose of nature – i.e., propagation, – must be regarded as perverse.” Hence, he concluded that homosexuals suffered a degree of sexual perversion because homosexual practices could not result in procreation. In some cases, homosexual libido was classified as a moral vice induced by the early practice of masturbation. Krafft-Ebing proposed a theory of homosexuality as biologically anomalous and originating in the embryonic and foetal stages of gestation, which evolved into a “sexual inversion” of the brain. In 1901, in an article in the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (Yearbook for Intermediate Sexual Types), he changed the biological term from anomaly to differentiation.

Although the primary focus is on sexual behaviour in men, there are sections on Sadism in Woman, Masochism in Woman, and Lesbian Love. Several of the cases of sexual activity with children were committed by women.

Krafft-Ebing’s conclusions about homosexuality are now largely forgotten, partly because Sigmund Freud’s theories were more interesting to physicians (who considered homosexuality to be a psychological problem) and partly because he incurred the enmity of the Austrian Catholic Church when he psychologically associated martyrdom (a desire for sanctity) with hysteria and masochism.

On This Day … 12 October

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Events

  • 1773 – America’s first insane asylum opens.

People (Births)

  • 1925 – Denis Lazure, Canadian psychiatrist and politician (d. 2008).
  • 1929 – Robert Coles, American psychologist, author, and academic.

People (Deaths)

  • 1948 – Susan Sutherland Isaacs, English psychologist and psychoanalyst (b. 1885).

Eastern State Hospital (Virginia)

Eastern State Hospital is a psychiatric hospital in Williamsburg, Virginia. Built in 1773, it was the first public facility in the present-day United States constructed solely for the care and treatment of the mentally ill. The original building had burned but was reconstructed in 1985.

Denis Lazure

Denis Lazure (12 October 1925 to 23 February 2008) was a Canadian psychiatrist and politician. Lazure was a Member of the National Assembly of Quebec (MNA) from 1976 to 1984 and from 1989 to 1996. He is the father of actress Gabrielle Lazure.

Robert Coles

Robert Coles (born 12 October 1929) is an American author, child psychiatrist, and professor emeritus at Harvard University.

Knowing that he was to be called into the US Armed Forces under the ‘doctors’ draft’, Coles joined the Air Force in 1958 and was assigned the rank of captain. His field of specialisation was psychiatry, his intention eventually to sub-specialise in child psychiatry. He served as chief of neuropsychiatric services at Keesler Air Force base in Biloxi, Mississippi.

Susan Isaacs

Susan Sutherland Isaacs, CBE (née Fairhurst; 24 May 1885 to 12 October 1948; also known as Ursula Wise) was a Lancashire-born educational psychologist and psychoanalyst.

She published studies on the intellectual and social development of children and promoted the nursery school movement. For Isaacs, the best way for children to learn was by developing their independence. She believed that the most effective way to achieve this was through play, and that the role of adults and early educators was to guide children’s play.