The Peculiar Institution and the Making of Modern Psychiatry, 1840-1880 - by Wendy Gonaver (Paperback)

About the Book

"Argues that slavery and race relations in the South shaped the theory and practice of early psychiatry. The book examines continuities in psychiatric treatment that provided for the gradual expansion of the state's power of involuntary confinement. The impact of these continuities continues to be seen in contemporary health practices for women, African Americans, the indigent, and prisoners"--

Book Synopsis

Though the origins of asylums can be traced to Europe, the systematic segregation of the mentally ill into specialized institutions occurred in the United States only after 1800, just as the struggle to end slavery took hold. In this book, Wendy Gonaver examines the relationship between these two historical developments, showing how slavery and ideas about race shaped early mental health treatment in the United States, especially in the South. She reveals these connections through the histories of two asylums in Virginia: the Eastern Lunatic Asylum in Williamsburg, the first in the nation; and the Central Lunatic Asylum in Petersburg, the first created specifically for African Americans. Eastern Lunatic Asylum was the only institution to accept both slaves and free blacks as patients and to employ slaves as attendants.

Drawing from these institutions' untapped archives, Gonaver reveals how slavery influenced ideas about patient liberty, about the proper relationship between caregiver and patient, about what constituted healthy religious belief and unhealthy fanaticism, and about gender. This early form of psychiatric care acted as a precursor to public health policy for generations, and Gonaver's book fills an important gap in the historiography of mental health and race in the nineteenth century.

Review Quotes

"The Peculiar Institution and the Making of Modern Psychiatry is a valuable institutional history, in addition to the contribution it makes to the history of race and medicine."--Black Perspectives

"A welcome addition. . . . Studies such as these may indeed help us to better understand the racialized roots of heath inequality that continue to plague us today."--H-Sci-Med-Tech

"Based on impeccable research and a deep excavation of the surviving records, Gonaver has rightly identified an important subject of historical investigation: the ways in which Southern institutions contributed to the development of modern American medicine." -- Jim Downs, author of Sick from Freedom: African American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction

"Eminently readable. . . . A great addition to the literature on asylums."--Journal of Social History

"Gonaver's meticulous attention to both individual patients and broader patterns of treatment make this a valuable study of nineteenth-century asylums. The Peculiar Institution and the Making of Modern Psychiatry, 1840-1880 reveals how the key institutions of societal power -- slavery, race, religion, marriage, and medical science -- shaped both daily practices of care and debates over appropriate therapy." -- Sharla Fett, Occidental College

"Gonaver's monograph is a truly illuminating addition to canons of American medical history and racialized society, one that will inspire and fascinate students and scholars of slavery and madness in the nineteenth century."--Journal of the Civil War Era

"Provides a fascinating glimpse of the origins of humane treatment of the mentally ill and a sound indictment of nineteenth-century pseudoscientific thought."--CHOICE

"This is a timely, intriguing, and deeply researched social history, telling the story of how a racially hierarchical, internally segregated, asylum set at the heart of chattel slavery was absorbed into perhaps an even bleaker carceral system following the Civil War."--Bulletin of the History of Medicine