Book Reviews

In the very active research area of the history of psychiatry in the nineteenth century, German historian Jens Gründler makes a notable addition with his study on the relationship between poverty and insanity, using the example of Woodilee Asylum founded near Glasgow in Scotland in 1875. At the centre of this dissertation, which he submitted as part of the special research area ‘Fremdheit und Armut’ at the University of Trier, are ‘poor lunatics’ and their relatives. Gründler goes beyond the realm of the institution and reconstructs the life stories of the patients before and after their stay there. He achieves this with records from the organizations that cared for the poor, in addition to patient files and documents from the hospital administration, analysing samples of both inventories. While the poverty files and the psychiatric records only partly reconstruct the ‘patient’s view’ as Roy Porter (1985) defined it, the sources do provide an insight into the social situation of the family of institutionalized patients outside this institution, thus enabling a glimpse into their life stories as a whole. In the German history of psychiatry, the approach to make patients visible as agents using Alf Lüdtke’s (1994) concept of ‘Eigensinn’ (which means both obstinacy and self-will) is not a new one. Thus, Gründler moves from the largely known arguments to the question of how the institutionalized male and female patients around 1900 behaved within a ‘total institution’ (Goffman, 1961). Yet the author does not primarily want to investigate the ‘interior life’ at the institution in all its facets. Rather, he asks what opportunities for action these ‘poor lunatics’ and their relatives had, despite all the restrictions, in their attempts to straddle the spectrum of care for the poor and psychiatry as it was practised at the institution. Accordingly, in expanding his gaze onto the history of psychiatry, Gründler enters a new terrain and reveals astonishing findings. He emphasizes that, while a large portion of the patients were admitted at the request of the relatives, their expression of ‘madness’ had been endured or borne for a longer period of time beforehand by their social surroundings. Furthermore, the same number of patients were picked up by the police due to deviant behaviour and were treated with compulsory institutionalization. With his case files, Gründler convincingly argues against the assumption that psychiatric institutions during the nineteenth century mainly served as a place of custody because, as he shows, a large number of cases achieved a ‘recovery’ in the sense that the patients not only found a job but also eventually even reintegrated into society. For the less ‘successfully’ treated, the author manages to follow their ‘hospital careers’ through an analysis of the poverty files. 584545 HPY0010.1177/0957154X15584545History of PsychiatryNolte research-article2015