Book ID: CBB685131174

Madness in the City of Magnificent Intentions: A History of Race and Mental Illness in the Nation's Capital (2019)

unapi

Summers, Martin (Author)


Oxford University Press


Publication Date: 2019
Physical Details: 408
Language: English

From the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries, Saint Elizabeths Hospital was one of the United States' most important institutions for the care and treatment of the mentally ill. Founded in 1855 to treat insane soldiers and sailors as well as civilian residents in the nation'scapital, the institution became one of the country's preeminent research and teaching psychiatric hospitals. From the beginning of its operation, Saint Elizabeths admitted black patients, making it one of the few American asylums to do so. This book is a history of the hospital and its relationshipto Washington, DC's African American community. It charts the history of Saint Elizabeths from its founding to the late-1980s, when the hospital's mission and capabilities changed as a result of deinstitutionalization, and its transfer from the federal government to the District of Columbia. Drawingon a wide variety of sources, including patient case files, the book demonstrates how race was central to virtually every aspect of the hospital's existence, from the ways in which psychiatrists understood mental illness and employed therapies to treat it to the ways that black patients experiencedtheir institutionalization. The book argues that assumptions about the existence of distinctive black and white psyches shaped the therapeutic and diagnostic regimes in the hospital and left a legacy of poor treatment of African American patients, even after psychiatrists had begun to rejectracialist conceptions of the psyche. Yet black patients and their communities asserted their own agency and exhibited a "rights consciousness" in large and small ways, from agitating for more equal treatment to attempting to manage the therapeutic experience.

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Reviewed By

Review Kylie Smith (2021) Review of "Madness in the City of Magnificent Intentions: A History of Race and Mental Illness in the Nation's Capital". Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences (pp. 222-224). unapi

Review Shelby Pumphrey (2022) Review of "Madness in the City of Magnificent Intentions: A History of Race and Mental Illness in the Nation's Capital". Bulletin of the History of Medicine (pp. 276-278). unapi

Review Wendy Gonaver (2021) Review of "Madness in the City of Magnificent Intentions: A History of Race and Mental Illness in the Nation's Capital". History of Psychiatry (pp. 116-117). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB685131174/

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Authors & Contributors
Segrest, Mab
Michael Ra-shon Hall
Mendes, Gabriel N.
Rabben, Magne Brekke
Chanoff, David
Hatch, Anthony Ryan
Concepts
African Americans
Psychiatry
African Americans and science
Medicine and race
Psychiatric hospitals
Racism
Time Periods
20th century
19th century
21st century
20th century, early
18th century
Places
United States
Georgia (U.S.)
South Asia
Württemberg (Germany)
Romania
New York City (New York, U.S.)
Institutions
Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic
Association of Minority Health Professions Schools (AMHPS)
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