Petty Tyranny and Soulless Discipline

High expectations for a better world followed the First World War. Many changes took place aligned with “progress”, but in England the poorest benefited little from them. This was all too evident in the public mental hospitals which were at the foot of national and local hierarchies of welfare priority.

Petty Tyranny and Soulless Discipline places patients at its centre to explore their daily lives, including their admission, care, treatment, discharge and after-care, or death. These narratives, drawn from a range of primary sources, are contextualised in an historical analysis of how and why a mixture of stagnating and changing knowledge, attitudes and ideals affected their experiences.

The Lunacy Act 1890 underpinned mental hospital life by prescribing institutional organisation, regulation and funding. Central and local government, trades unions, voluntary organisations, a variety of professionals plus campaigners for reform, often argued from their own competing perspectives and influenced patients’ lives. There was also new medical knowledge, from Britain and beyond. A fearful mindset among the leadership inhibited shifting from rigid practices, deemed safe and effective in “containing” mentally ill people, to more flexible and humane approaches, to promote wellbeing. Often, knowing what might benefit patients matched neither policy nor practice. Improvements were inconsistent, patchy and slow to materialise.

Petty Tyranny and Soulless Discipline weaves the many diverse strands into a coherent whole, to reveal the complexity of mental health provision in the past, and to encourage reflection with the potential to inform debate today.

This book project is led by Dr Claire Hilton, an Honorary Research Fellow at CIRMH and Birkbeck School of Historical Studies.