A literary exploration of British cultural attitudes to psychiatry during the late 1800s and their development over the following century

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (S1) ◽  
pp. S578-S578
Author(s):  
A. Pittock

IntroductionBritish psychiatry was in its embryonic stage in the late nineteenth century. Early psychiatrists employed radical treatments with little success and not much is documented about public attitudes. Using fictional depictions of madness and physicians allows us to explore cultural attitudes to psychiatry at the time.ObjectivesFirst, to analyze the portrayal of madness and physicians in the island of Dr. Moreau and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; second, to use this to provide insight into the public opinion of psychiatry and third, to evaluate the development of attitudes using twentieth century media.AimTo provide an insight into the social perspective of mental illness in the late nineteenth century and consider its evolution over the last one hundred years.MethodsTwo famous, well-received novels of the time were chosen for analysis. Historical knowledge of the period was sought using JSTOR, NHS Scotland's The Knowledge Network and Google Scholar. Novels and media depictions were analysed in relation to the scientific understanding at the time.ResultsThe novels show two ways of control: surgical (Moreau) and chemical (Jekyll). Both are unsuccessful, as were physician's attempts in reality. The narrators’ concerns mirror the cultural anxiety at the time surrounding containment and treatment of mental illness. Media portrayal of cruel, unsuccessful treatment continues throughout the twentieth century.ConclusionsNineteenth century cultural attitudes to mental illness show a distinct anxiety and concern with barbaric treatments and their inefficacy. Despite psychiatric progress, the media have continued to portray mental illness and its treatment in a negative light, suggesting continued levels of societal concern.Disclosure of interestThe author has not supplied his/her declaration of competing interest.

Author(s):  
Sally Crawford ◽  
Katharina Ulmschneider

Archaeologists often ignore the presence of children as a contributing factor in the archaeological record. However, recent analysis of a number of glass plate and film photographs taken by archaeologists at the end of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century shows that children were often incorporated into the photograph, either deliberately or inadvertently. These images provide not just a record of ancient sites and monuments, but also of the many local children who appear in the photographs. The children recorded by archaeologists offer an insight into children, their childhoods, their freedoms, and their place in society across a range of cultures in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, as well as raising questions about how archaeologists ‘saw’ the human subject in photographs where monuments and sites were the object.


2007 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 278-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Constable

This article examines the Scottish missionary contribution to a Scottish sense of empire in India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Initially, the article reviews general historiographical interpretations which have in recent years been developed to explain the Scottish relationship with British imperial development in India. Subsequently the article analyses in detail the religious contributions of Scottish Presbyterian missionaries of the Church of Scotland and the Free Church Missions to a Scottish sense of empire with a focus on their interaction with Hindu socioreligious thought in nineteenth-century western India. Previous missionary historiography has tended to focus substantially on the emergence of Scottish evangelical missionary activity in India in the early nineteenth century and most notably on Alexander Duff (1806–78). Relatively little has been written on Scottish Presbyterian missions in India in the later nineteenth century, and even less on the significance of their missionary thought to a Scottish sense of Indian empire. Through an analysis of Scottish Presbyterian missionary critiques in both vernacular Marathi and English, this article outlines the orientalist engagement of Scottish Presbyterian missionary thought with late nineteenth-century popular Hinduism. In conclusion this article demonstrates how this intellectual engagement contributed to and helped define a Scottish missionary sense of empire in India.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-242 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Johnson

The late nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth century saw the drum kit emerge as an assemblage of musical instruments that was central to much new music of the time and especially to the rise of jazz. This article is a study of Chinese drums in the making of the drum kit. The notions of localization and exoticism are applied as conceptual tools for interpreting the place of Chinese drums in the early drum kit. Why were distinctly Chinese drums used in the early drum kit? How did the Chinese drums shape the future of the drum kit? The drum kit has been at the heart of most popular music throughout the twentieth century to the present day, and, as such, this article will be beneficial to educators, practitioners and scholars of popular music education.


Author(s):  
Melissa Van Drie

This article presents a historical and theoretical reflection of the théâtrophone, a late nine- teenth-century telephone broadcast service that allowed users at a distance to listen in live to local theatre performances (spoken theatre, opera and musical concerts). Often cited as the first binaural experience in 1881, the théâtrophone’s much longer history as a subscription service, which operated in Paris from 1889 through the mid-1930s, is relatively unknown. This article considers what hearing through a théâtrophone meant to nineteenth- and twentieth- century users beyond its initial 1881 prototype. To hear through the théâtrophone means adopting a methodology mirroring the artefact itself: moving between social, professional, artistic, sensory registers. In doing so, the ways in which the théâtrophone was attuned to dis- course and practice emerge, as do more subtle processes involved in new nineteenth-century constructs of hearing and listening. Precisely the théâtrophone’s development is examined in relation to its particular social context: its installation on the spectacular Parisian boulevards and its relation to fin de siècle theatre culture. The article first investigates how theatrophonic listening was accorded to existent practices of theatre-going. Second, the article explores the more radical propositions of the théâtrophone in relation to important aesthetic and prac- tical changes occurring simultaneously in theatre culture. The théâtrophone’s virtual sonic experience multiplied the forms of a performance and its modalities of creation and recep- tion. Through accounts of ‘listening in’ the aspects of the new sonically constructed space are described, as are postures of early mediatised listening. The article posits that new modalities of listening are articulated through the théâtrophone, with certain users, including Proust, defining it as a monitoring and creative tool. In this capacity, ‘theatrophonic’ listening contrib- uted to the development of a refined ear, capable of detecting sonic nuance, which was central to artistic sensibilities at the time. 


2011 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine E. Foley

For over a hundred years the Irish céilí, as an ‘invented’ social dance event and mode of interaction, has played a significant and changing role. This paper examines the invention of this Irish dance event and how it has developed in Ireland throughout the twentieth century. From the Gaelic League's cultural nationalist, ideological agenda of the late nineteenth century, for a culturally unified Ireland, to the manifestation of a new cultural confidence in Ireland, from the 1970s, this paper explores how the céilí has provided an important site for the construction, experiencing and negotiation of different senses of community and identity.


Author(s):  
Leah Price

This chapter suggests that two phenomena that usually get explained in terms of the rise of electronic media in the late twentieth century—the dematerialization of the text and the disembodiment of the reader—have more to do with two much earlier developments. One is legal: the 1861 repeal of the taxes previously imposed on all paper except that used for printing bibles. The other is technological: the rise first of wood-pulp paper in the late nineteenth century and then of plastics in the twentieth. The chapter then looks at Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1861–62), the loose, baggy ethnography of the urban underclass that swelled out of a messy series of media. Mayhew's “cyclopaedia of the industry, the want, and the vice of the great Metropolis” so encyclopedically catalogs the uses to which used paper can be turned.


Author(s):  
Sarah Palmer

This essay charts the considerable decline of the British shipping industry in the twentieth century. Sarah Palmer demonstrates that growing distance between shipowners and shipbuilders; tremendous decline in liner shipping; unwillingness to innovate; and inconsistent policies established by the government that played significant roles in the decline from the turn of the century’s forty percent global tonnage rates to the meagre three percent reported in 2007.


Author(s):  
Brianna Theobald

This chapter lays the groundwork for the book’s use of the Crow Reservation in Montana as an extended case study. After providing an overview of Crow history to the late nineteenth century, the chapter sketches the parameters of a Crow birthing culture that prevailed in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. Crow women navigated pregnancy and childbirth within female generational networks; viewed childbirth as a sex-segregated social process; and placed their trust in the midwifery services of older women. The chapter further explores government employees’ attitudes toward and interventions in Indigenous pregnancy, childbirth, and especially family life in these years, as these ostensibly private domains emerged as touchstones in the federal government’s ongoing assimilation efforts.


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