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Book ID: CBB974838228

Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum: Doctors, Patients, and Practices (2017)

Wallis, Jennifer (Author)

Palgrave Macmillan
Publication date: 2017
Language: English

ISBN: 9783319567136

Publication Date: 2017
Physical Details: 276 pp.

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Bodily fluids Psychology Patients Physicians; doctors Human body Psychiatric hospitals 19th century

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book explores how the body was investigated in the late nineteenth-century asylum in Britain. As more and more Victorian asylum doctors looked to the bodily fabric to reveal the ‘truth’ of mental disease, a whole host of techniques and technologies were brought to bear upon the patient's body. These practices encompassed the clinical and the pathological, from testing the patient's reflexes to dissecting the brain. Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum takes a unique approach to the topic, conducting a chapter-by-chapter dissection of the body. It considers how asylum doctors viewed and investigated the skin, muscles, bones, brain, and bodily fluids. The book demonstrates the importance of the body in nineteenth-century psychiatry as well as how the asylum functioned as a site of research, and will be of value to historians of psychiatry, the body, and scientific practice.

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Reviewed By

Review Dolly MacKinnon (2020) Review of "Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum: Doctors, Patients, and Practices". Social History of Medicine (pp. 338-339). unapi

Review Cristiano Turbil (2020) Review of "Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum: Doctors, Patients, and Practices". Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 187-188). unapi

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