The Peculiar Institution and the Making of Modern Psychiatry, 1840-1880

Wendy Gonaver's study of race and mental illness in nineteenth-century Virginia is an important book. Several monographs have examined the history of Eastern Lunatic Asylum (Ela) in Williamsburg, and a number of theses and dissertations have been written about Central Lunatic Asylum (Cla) in Petersburg, but no historian to date has looked at these two institutions together. Established in 1773, Ela admitted black and white Virginians who were considered insane, including enslaved African Americans, for a ten-year period beginning in 1846. Cla opened in 1869 as the state's colored insane asylum, effectively ending the admission of blacks to the Williamsburg hospital. In examining the medical thought of the Ela superintendent John M. Galt II along with the policies and experiences of patients at both asylums, Gonaver argues that slavery and ideas about racial difference were critical to the development of nineteenth-century psychiatry. Much of this book is dedicated to Galt and Ela. The Williamsburg asylum was unique, according to Gonaver, due to the presence of free blacks and slaves among the patient population and Galt's employment of enslaved people as attendants. This reflected and further contributed to his unorthodox positions, including his opposition to racially segregated institutions and the use of mechanical restraints, and his early advocacy for outpatient care, which he analogized to the hiring out of slaves. Galt's ideas were ahead of their time, Gonaver argues, and their rejection by the psychiatric profession was a lost opportunity to provide a model of more liberal, humane care for mentally ill African Americans. The neglect of the well-being of mentally ill blacks in the postemancipation era was epitomized by Cla, which Gonaver describes as “essentially a plantation where forced labor was paired with frequent mechanical restraint” (p. 10

Criminology · Historiography · Insanity · Lunatic · Mental health · Mental illness · Opposition (politics · Political science · Politics · Population · Psychiatry · Sociology · White (mutation · Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology · Demography · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · History · History of Science and Medicine · Law · Medicine