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Full-Text Articles in History
Home Sweet Home: Domesticity In English And Scottish Insane Asylums, 1890-1914, Vesna Curlic
Home Sweet Home: Domesticity In English And Scottish Insane Asylums, 1890-1914, Vesna Curlic
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
This thesis considers the implementation of domestic aesthetics and activities in the insane asylum at the end of the nineteenth century. Doctors sought to bring elements of the Victorian home into the asylum as part of a modern, humane regime of mental healthcare, which I call “institutional domesticity.” I argue that this process was fraught with challenges. While implementation of domesticity was relatively successful in regard to asylum activities, like labour and employment, domesticity reached its limitations in the physical asylum space. Ultimately, this thesis demonstrates the ways in which all asylum actors, including patients, staff, community members, and the …
Vile Blood: Hereditary Degeneracy In Victorian England, Dalton Lee Brock
Vile Blood: Hereditary Degeneracy In Victorian England, Dalton Lee Brock
Theses and Dissertations from 2019
During the late 1800s, the people of England grew anxious about hereditary degeneracy. That anxiety was rooted in the medical literature of the Victorian period. Nature predetermined individuals to be either healthy or unhealthy. Unhealthy individuals were marked by degenerative mental or physical characteristics such as epilepsy. Medical professionals, including Henry Maudsley, emphasized reversion and its hereditary nature as a threat to individuals and society. All based their works and arguments on Charles Darwin’s idea of inheritance. Darwin, in turn, had adopted and modified Lamarckian inheritance to make up for the absence of an inheritance principle in his theory of …