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9 - Explorations of Scottish, German, and American Psychiatry: The Work of Helen Boyle and Isabel Hutton in the Treatment of Noncertifiable Mental Disorders in England, 1899–1939

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2012

Louise Westwood
Affiliation:
Department of History at the University of Sussex
Volker Roelcke
Affiliation:
Giessen University, Germany
Paul J. Weindling
Affiliation:
Oxford Brookes University
Louise Westwood
Affiliation:
University of Sussex
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Summary

State controlled care of the insane in Britain at the start of the twentieth century is often described as conservative because the emphasis was on certification and institutionalization for rate-aided patients. However, Britain cannot be considered as a whole because the laws governing mental health care were different in Scotland and England. Toward the end of the nineteenth century Scotland had temporary care for noncertifiable mental cases and community guardianship schemes for nonviolent cases of insanity. In 1894 Dr. John Carswell wrote that the General Board of Lunacy had “permitted the use of one male and one female ward in Barnhill Parochial Hospital for the treatment of doubtful and temporary non-certified cases.” In England borderline conditions were not acknowledged and prophylaxis and outpatient facilities were rare. This situation was the exact opposite of the psychiatric practice developing in Germany. The main protagonists in this chapter explored these German developments for their own clinical practice. Dr. Helen Boyle (1869–1957) and Dr. Isabel Hutton (1887–1960) traveled extensively in Europe and the United States in search of new ideas and good practices in an effort to improve the treatment of acute, temporary, and noncertifiable mental disorders in England.

The Law, Psychiatric Clinics, and the Treatment of Noncertifi able Mental Disorders

Under the 1890 and 1891 Lunacy Acts for England and Wales there was no possibility of treatment in a public asylum without certification; hospitals admitting mental patients had to be approved and registered by the regulating authority and nursing homes were not allowed to take mental cases. Dispensaries were new to the nineteenth century and a few asylums and general hospitals had them for mental disorders, but they were rare outside London. St. Thomas’s and the Charing Cross Hospital had clinics for mental disorders. In 1890 Dr. L. S. Forbes Winslow opened a charitable outpatient clinic in Euston Road, London for the mentally disordered poor, which was known as the British Hospital for Nervous Disorders.

Type
Chapter
Information
International Relations in Psychiatry
Britain, Germany, and the United States to World War II
, pp. 179 - 196
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2010

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