Summers, Martin (Author)
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.
...MoreReview 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).
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).
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).
Article
Summers, Martin;
(2010)
“Suitable Care of the African When Afflicted With Insanity”: Race, Madness, and Social Order in Comparative Perspective
(/isis/citation/CBB001020993/)
Thesis
Jazmin Antwynette Evans;
(2019)
Scientific Racism's Role in the Social Thought of African Intellectual, Moral, and Physical Inferiority
(/isis/citation/CBB578195827/)
Book
Mab Segrest;
(2020)
Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum
(/isis/citation/CBB644941122/)
Thesis
David Alan Varel;
(2015)
Race, Class, and Socialization: Allison Davis and Twentieth-century American Social Thought
(/isis/citation/CBB664780930/)
Article
Segrest, Mab;
(2014)
Exalted on the Ward: “Mary Roberts,” the Georgia State Sanitarium, and the Psychiatric “Speciality” of Race
(/isis/citation/CBB001201824/)
Book
Anthony Ryan Hatch;
(2016)
Blood Sugar: Racial Pharmacology and Food Justice in Black America
(/isis/citation/CBB245142743/)
Book
Farber, Paul Lawrence;
(2011)
Mixing Races: From Scientific Racism to Modern Evolutionary Ideas
(/isis/citation/CBB001033410/)
Book
Michael Ra-shon Hall;
(2021)
Freedom beyond confinement: travel and imagination in African American cultural history and letters
(/isis/citation/CBB148156098/)
Book
Gabriel N. Mendes;
(2015)
Under the Strain of Color: Harlem's Lafargue Clinic and the Promise of an Antiracist Psychiatry
(/isis/citation/CBB251110528/)
Book
Dennis A. Doyle;
(2016)
Psychiatry and Racial Liberalism in Harlem, 1936-1968
(/isis/citation/CBB833751424/)
Article
Doyle, Dennis;
(2010)
“Racial Differences Have to Be Considered”: Lauretta Bender, Bellevue Hospital, and the African American Psyche, 1936--52
(/isis/citation/CBB001232250/)
Thesis
Reed, Adam Metcalfe;
(2014)
Mental Death: Slavery, Madness and State Violence in the United States
(/isis/citation/CBB001567578/)
Book
Smith, Kimberly K.;
(2007)
African American Environmental Thought: Foundations
(/isis/citation/CBB000930104/)
Chapter
Thomas Müller;
(2016)
Between Therapeutic Instrument and Exploitation of Labour Force: Patient Work in Rural Asylums in Württemberg, c. 1810-1945
(/isis/citation/CBB769185485/)
Chapter
Waltraud Ernst;
(2016)
'Useful Both to the Patients as Well as to the State'. Patient Work in Colonial Mental Hospitals in South Asia, c. 1818-1948
(/isis/citation/CBB968778367/)
Chapter
Valentin-Veron Toma;
(2016)
Work and Occupation in Romanian Psychiatry, c. 1838-1945
(/isis/citation/CBB929069248/)
Book
David Chanoff;
Louis W. Sullivan;
(2022)
We'll Fight It Out Here: A History of the Ongoing Struggle for Health Equity
(/isis/citation/CBB412812968/)
Chapter
Sarah Chaney;
(2016)
Useful Members of Society or Motiveless Malingerers? Occupation and Malingering in British Asylum Psychiatry, 1870-1914
(/isis/citation/CBB768814259/)
Book
Anne Pollock;
(2021)
Sickening: Anti-Black Racism and Health Disparities in the United States
(/isis/citation/CBB548925523/)
Article
Magne Brekke Rabben;
Øyvind Thomassen;
(2019)
Humane treatment versus means of control: coercive measures in Norwegian high-security psychiatry, 1895–1978
(/isis/citation/CBB458667420/)
Be the first to comment!