IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB514513304

Sexual abuse by superintending staff in the nineteenth-century lunatic asylum: medical practice, complaint and risk (2021)

Dobbing, Cara (Author)
Tomkins, Alannah (Author)

History of Psychiatry
Volume: 32
Issue: 1
Pages: 69-84
Publication date: 2021
Language: English

DOI: 10.1177/0957154X20967299

URI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0957154X20967299

Outside Links

PubMed

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Medical abuse Rape; sexual violence Clinical psychology Discipline formation Criminal law Mass media Sexual harassment Doctor-patient relationships Psychiatric hospitals 19th century

The nineteenth century witnessed a great shift in how insanity was regarded and treated. Well documented is the emergence of psychiatry as a medical specialization and the role of lunatic asylums in the West. Unclear are the relationships between the heads of institutions and the individuals treated within them. This article uses two cases at either end of the nineteenth century to demonstrate sexual misdemeanours in sites of mental health care, and particularly how they were dealt with, both legally and in the press. They illustrate issues around cultures of complaint and the consequences of these for medical careers. Far from being representative, they highlight the need for further research into the doctor–patient relationship within asylums, and what happened when the boundaries were blurred.

...More

Citation URI

data.isiscb.org/p/isis/citation/CBB514513304

This citation is part of the Isis database.

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Article Garton, Stephen; (2010)
Criminal Propensities: Psychiatry, Classification and Imprisonment in New York State 1916--1940 (/p/isis/citation/CBB000932833/)

Thesis Ethan Czuy Levine; (2018)
Studying Rape: The Production of Scientific Knowledge about Sexual Violence in the United States and Canada (/p/isis/citation/CBB208363097/)

Article Elisa Mandelli; (2019)
Lo sguardo e la performance. Le relazioni tra medico, paziente psichiatrico e spettatore dal cinema medicale al museo multimediale (/p/isis/citation/CBB446259905/)

Article E. Claire Cage; (2019)
Child Sexual Abuse and Medical Expertise in Nineteenth-Century France (/p/isis/citation/CBB516319186/)

Article Reaume, Geoffrey; (1997)
Accounts of abuse of patients at the Toronto Hospital for the Insane, 1883-1937 (/p/isis/citation/CBB000079758/)

Article Wetzell, Richard; (2009)
Psychiatry and Criminal Justice in Modern Germany, 1880--1933 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001030995/)

Article Whitney Wood; (2018)
‘Put Right Under’: Obstetric Violence in Post-war Canada (/p/isis/citation/CBB443998318/)

Article David May; (2019)
The Baldovan Institution Abuse Inquiry: A Forgotten Scandal (/p/isis/citation/CBB413496613/)

Book Antonio Semerari; (2022)
La relazione terapeutica. Storia, teoria e problemi (/p/isis/citation/CBB311426059/)

Book Heather Wolffram; (2018)
Forensic Psychology in Germany: Witnessing Crime, 1880-1939 (/p/isis/citation/CBB886091707/)

Book Wheatley, Thelma; (2013)
“And Neither Have I Wings to Fly”: Labelled and Locked up in Canada's Oldest Institution (/p/isis/citation/CBB001420282/)

Article Ivan Simic; (2020)
The Curious Case of Aleksandar Milivojević: The Donja Toponica Hospital and Mental Health in Socialist Yugoslavia (/p/isis/citation/CBB477488127/)

Book Malacrida, Claudia; (2015)
A Special Hell: Institutional Life in Alberta's Eugenic Years (/p/isis/citation/CBB001422603/)

Book Hornblum, Allen M.; (1998)
Acres of skin: Human experiments at Holmesburg Prison: A true story of abuse and exploitation in the name of medical science (/p/isis/citation/CBB000078223/)

Article Jonathan Andrews; Chris Philo; (2017)
James Frame’s The Philosophy of Insanity (1860) (/p/isis/citation/CBB313587958/)

Article Carlos Francisco Almeida de Oliveira; Carlos Evandro Martins Eulálio; Viriato Campelo; Paulo Dalgalarrondo; Tom Dening; (2016)
A historiographic study of psychiatric treatments in Brazil: mentalism and organicism from 1830 to 1859 (/p/isis/citation/CBB284956374/)

Article Chiara Tesi; Mario Picozzi; (2021)
Five autopsy reports of rib fractures in the mental hospital of Reggio Emilia (1874–5): pathogenesis proposal in defence of the ‘non-restraint’ system (/p/isis/citation/CBB627067961/)

Book Sylvelyn Hahner-Rombach; Karen Nolte; (2017)
Patients and Social Practice of Psychiatric Nursing in the 19th and 20th Century (/p/isis/citation/CBB270047464/)

Book Juliette Rigondet; (2019)
Un village pour aliénés tranquilles (/p/isis/citation/CBB605654043/)

Article Sara Wetzler; (2022)
What faces reveal: Hugh Diamond’s photographic representations of mental illness (/p/isis/citation/CBB326372112/)