Yorkshire’s influence on the understanding and treatment of mental diseases in Victorian Britain: The golden triad of York,Wakefield, and Leeds

In the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a more humane approach to the care of the insane in Britain was catalyzed in part by the illness of King George III. The Reform Movement envisaged “moral” treatment in asylums in pleasant rural environments, but these aspirations were overwhelmed by industrialization, urbanization, and the scale of the need, such that most asylums became gigantic institutions for chronic insanity. Three institutions in Yorkshire remained beacons of enlightenment in the general gloom of Victorian alienism: the Retreat in York founded and developed by the Quaker Tuke family; the West Riding Lunatic Asylum in Wakefield led by Sir James Crichton-Browne, which initiated research into brain and mental diseases; and the Leeds Medical School and Wakefield axis associated with Sir Thomas Clifford Allbutt, which pioneered teaching of mental diseases and, later, the first Chair of Psychiatry. Three other Yorkshiremen who greatly influenced nineteenth-century “neuropsychiatry” in Britain and abroad were Thomas Laycock in York and Edinburgh, and Henry Maudsley and John Hughlings Jackson in London.     

REVIEW

Economics and the Dreamtime. By H.G. Butlin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1993. Pp. xi + 252. Price $A35 paperback, $A90 hardback.     

Compositional Form in Montaigne's Essais and the Self-Portrait

For centuries, the myth of the Oresteia has been one of the pillars of patriarchal cultures. The revisionist trend that has appeared in European literature in the last decades urges the establishment of a new symbolic order that embraces maternal genealogies. I sogni di Clitennestra (1981) by Dacia Maraini and Clitemnestra (1986) by María José Ragué-Arias rewrite the Orestes myth from a feminist perspective, warning about the dangers involved in the perception of the mother as a monstrous and phobic object that must be eliminated. Their works show that psychic matricide is not a viable way to acquire subjectivity, since it is based in masculine anxieties and in absolute identification with the father, which is in turn the base for a society also founded on violence. Maraini and Ragué-Arias vindicate Clytemnestra while denouncing the violence inherent to the patriarchal order of Western societies.