A Burnt-Out Case follows Querry, a celebrated European architect of churches who has lost all feeling: for his work, for women, for God and for himself. Travelling as far as the river boats will take him, he arrives at a leproserie deep in the Belgian Congo run by a community of missionary fathers and by Dr Colin, an atheist physician devoted to his patients.
Medical tag
Asylum Institution
Asylums, madhouses, hospitals, prisons as medical spaces, confinement.
Works
Pinel presents insanity as a medical and moral problem rather than a condition to be met chiefly with chains, spectacle, or punishment. The treatise moves between nosology, institutional observation, and therapeutic counsel.
Frank O'Neal Addington had been hospitalized in Texas state mental hospitals many times between 1969 and 1975. In December 1975, after he was arrested on a misdemeanor charge of assault by threat against his mother, she petitioned for his indefinite commitment.
Alone in Berlin (Jeder stirbt für sich allein, 'Everyone dies for himself alone') opens in Berlin in 1940, as the postwoman Eva Kluge delivers to Otto and Anna Quangel the news that their only son has been killed in the invasion of France. The Quangels live in a tenement at 55 Jablonski Strasse with neighbours who represent the range of life under Nazism: the Persickes, a family of brutal Party loyalists; old Frau Rosenthal, a Jewish widow whose flat is looted and who is hounded until she jumps to her death; and retired judge Fromm, who quietly helps where he can.
Locke says in the Epistle to the Reader that the Essay began when five or six friends meeting in his rooms found themselves at a standstill over questions of morality and revealed religion, and he proposed that they first examine what objects human understanding is fitted to deal with. Nearly twenty years later the result was a long, patient survey of where ideas come from, how they combine, how words signify them and how far knowledge and probable belief can reach.
Anne of Green Gables opens in Avonlea, a farming village on Prince Edward Island, where the elderly brother and sister Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert have arranged to adopt a boy from a Nova Scotia orphan asylum to help on their farm. Through a mistake the child sent is Anne Shirley, an eleven-year-old red-haired girl who talks without stopping, renames everything she loves and has survived a hard childhood by imagination.
As You Like It begins with two households divided by envy. Orlando, youngest son of the late Sir Rowland de Boys, complains to the old servant Adam that his elder brother Oliver keeps him like a peasant and denies him the education his father willed him.
This collection pairs Melville's posthumous novella Billy Budd, Sailor with the best of the short fiction he published in magazines in the 1850s, usually including Bartleby, the Scrivener, Benito Cereno and The Encantadas (contents vary by edition). Bartleby (1853) is narrated by a comfortable Wall Street lawyer who hires a pale, quiet copyist.
Eric Metaxas's Bonhoeffer is a full-length popular biography of the German Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), written for a general Christian readership. It begins with the large, cultured Bonhoeffer family of Breslau and Berlin: his father Karl, a leading professor of psychiatry and neurology; his devout mother Paula, who schooled her children at home in their early years; his twin sister Sabine; and the death of his brother Walter in the First World War, which marked the family deeply.
This record concerns compulsory sterilization and is best read with a teacher's guidance. In March 1924 Virginia enacted a statute permitting the superintendents of certain state institutions to have inmates sterilized if, after a hearing, they were found to be afflicted with hereditary forms of insanity or what the law called imbecility.
Cannery Row is a loosely plotted, affectionate portrait of the sardine-cannery district of Monterey, California, during the Depression, built from short narrative chapters alternating with self-contained vignettes or 'inter-chapters'. Its centre is Doc, a gentle, learned marine biologist who runs the Western Biological Laboratory, collects specimens from the tide pools, listens to Gregorian chant and Bach, reads poetry, and is trusted by everyone on the Row.
Ceremony follows Tayo, a young man of mixed Laguna and white ancestry, who returns to the Laguna Pueblo reservation in New Mexico after the Second World War deeply ill in body and mind. In the Philippines he fought alongside his cousin Rocky, the family's favoured son, and endured the Bataan Death March; Rocky died of his wounds during the march, and Tayo could not save him.
Chess (Schachnovelle, also translated as The Royal Game or Chess Story) is narrated by a passenger on a liner sailing from New York to Buenos Aires shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War. Aboard is the world chess champion Mirko Czentovic, a stolid, almost illiterate son of a poor Danube boatman who was raised by a village priest, revealed an uncanny talent for chess, and now plays mechanically and greedily for money, showing no curiosity about anything else.
David Copperfield is the first-person autobiography of a novelist looking back on his life. David is born at Blunderstone in Suffolk six months after his father's death, on a night when his formidable great-aunt Betsey Trotwood storms out on learning he is not a girl.
Bleuler's Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias reworks Kraepelin's deteriorating psychosis into a broader and more psychologically complex group of disorders. Its most famous act is terminological: Bleuler introduces schizophrenia to name a splitting or disjunction in psychic functions, not a split personality in the popular sense.
Democracy in America is Tocqueville's great comparative study of democratic society. The first volume examines American political institutions: township government, federalism, courts, associations, parties, newspapers, religion, and the habits that sustain self-government.
Tuke describes the York Retreat, a Quaker institution founded after scandals in local madhouse care, as an alternative to fear, neglect, and routine coercion. The book gives the Retreat a history, an architecture, a daily rhythm, and a theory of treatment.
Dracula is told through journals, letters, phonograph diaries, telegrams and newspaper cuttings assembled by its characters. Jonathan Harker, a young English solicitor, travels to Transylvania to arrange the purchase of a London property, Carfax, for Count Dracula.
This volume joins Robert Frost's first three books of poems, all written about New England farm country and published between 1913 and 1916. A Boy's Will (London, 1913) is a book of short lyrics arranged in three parts, and the library text keeps the original contents page, where each title is followed by an italic gloss in the third person describing what the youth of the book is feeling: in Into My Own he imagines stealing away into dark trees and believes those who follow will find him only more sure of all he thought was true; in Storm Fear he is afraid of his own isolation; in The Tuft of Flowers a mower finds a patch of butterfly weed spared by the man who scythed the field before him and decides that men work together whether they work together or apart; and in Mowing a scythe whispers in the hay while the speaker concludes that fact is the sweetest dream labor knows.
Gabriel Oak, a young shepherd farming his own small flock on Norcombe Hill, falls in love with Bathsheba Everdene, a proud, lively girl staying with her aunt nearby. She saves his life when he nearly suffocates in his smoky hut, but refuses his plain proposal, saying she wants somebody to tame her.
Humboldt's Gift is narrated by Charlie Citrine, a successful middle-aged Chicago writer who has won a Pulitzer Prize and made a fortune from a Broadway hit about the eighteenth-century adventurer Baron von Trenck, which was also made into a film. Now in his fifties, Charlie is distracted, spiritually restless and steadily losing his money.
Jane Eyre is the life story, told by Jane herself, of an orphan girl who grows into a governess and finally a wife, keeping her conscience and her self-respect through poverty, temptation and grief. At ten Jane lives at Gateshead Hall with her aunt by marriage, Mrs. Reed, who resents her, and her bullying cousin John.
Kraepelin's Lectures on Clinical Psychiatry introduces readers to psychiatric diagnosis through bedside cases and disease course. Rather than beginning with abstract definitions, the lectures proceed from patients: mood disturbance, excitement, confusion, delusions, hallucinations, deterioration, alcoholism, epilepsy, paralysis, dementia praecox, manic-depressive insanity, and other clinical groupings.
Letters and Papers from Prison was assembled after the war by Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer's closest friend, former student and nephew by marriage, and published in 1951 as Widerstand und Ergebung ('Resistance and Submission'). It gathers what Bonhoeffer wrote during two years of imprisonment by the Nazi state, together with the essay 'After Ten Years', composed at Christmas 1942 as a stocktaking for fellow conspirators.
Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil was published in London in 1651, two years after the execution of Charles I, and its famous frontispiece shows a giant crowned sovereign whose body is made of hundreds of tiny subjects, holding a sword and a bishop's crozier above a peaceful town. The Introduction states the governing analogy: as art can make automata with springs for hearts and strings for nerves, so human art creates the commonwealth, an artificial man whose soul is sovereignty.
Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind is often called the first American psychiatry textbook. Benjamin Rush gathers observations, classifications, causes, and treatments for mania, melancholy, hypochondria, derangement, moral faculties, memory, and related conditions.
Esquirol expands Pinelian alienism into a more elaborate clinical and institutional system. Mental Maladies surveys insanity as a family of disorders marked by disturbances of perception, judgment, passion, volition, and bodily function.
Griesinger gives nineteenth-century psychiatry a somatic and medical program. Mental Pathology and Therapeutics treats insanity as a disorder of the brain, even while admitting how little pathological anatomy could yet prove.
Mrs. Dalloway follows a single day in the middle of June 1923 in London, from a bright morning to the small hours of a party. Clarissa Dalloway, fifty-one, wife of the Conservative Member of Parliament Richard Dalloway, walks from Westminster up to Bond Street to buy flowers for the party she is giving that evening.
In January 1957 Kenneth Donaldson was committed to the Florida State Hospital at Chattahoochee after his father sought a hearing before a Pinellas County judge, who found him mentally ill. He remained there against his will for nearly fifteen years.
The two respondents, identified in the case as L. C. and E. W., were Georgia women with intellectual disabilities who also had psychiatric diagnoses, schizophrenia in one case and a personality disorder in the other. Both were voluntarily admitted to Georgia Regional Hospital in Atlanta.
On Liberty asks what limits there are on the power society may legitimately exercise over the individual. Mill opens by observing that the old struggle between subjects and rulers has been transformed by democracy.
Orthodoxy (1908) is G. K. Chesterton's account of how he came to believe the Christian creed. It answers a challenge from the critic G. S. Street, who, after Chesterton's Heretics (1905) had criticized the philosophies of his contemporaries, said he would begin to worry about his own philosophy when Chesterton had given his.
Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in London in November 1790, is cast as a long letter to a young Frenchman, Charles-Jean-François Depont, who had asked Burke's opinion of events in Paris. Its immediate occasion was the sermon A Discourse on the Love of Our Country, preached by the Dissenting minister Richard Price on 4 November 1789 to the Revolution Society at the meeting-house in the Old Jewry, and the society's address of congratulation to the French National Assembly.
Maupassant's stories, written mostly between 1880 and 1890, are compact, ironic and often brutal studies of French life: Norman peasants, Parisian clerks, prostitutes, bourgeois families, soldiers and the provincial gentry. This selection gathers many of the best known, which typically include the following.
This volume, published in New York in 1922 as Three Plays, brought Pirandello's theatre to English readers. It contains Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) and Henry IV (1922), both translated by Edward Storer, and Right You Are!
St. Dymphna and the Geel Colony is less a single book than a layered dossier: a thirteenth-century Latin Vita by Pierre of Cambrai, a medieval shrine in the Brabant town of Geel, and a centuries-long practice of boarding mentally ill people with local families. The legend tells of an Irish princess whose widowed father, deranged by grief and desire, attempts to marry his daughter because she resembles her dead mother.
Tales from Shakespeare retells twenty of Shakespeare's plays as prose stories for children. A short preface explains the method: the authors keep Shakespeare's own words wherever they can, avoid words that came into English after his time, and hope the tales will send young readers on to the plays themselves when they are older.
The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories is a selection of Lovecraft's tales, edited with notes by the Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi, tracing his development from early Poe-influenced pieces to the 'cosmic horror' for which he is known. Lovecraft's central idea is that humanity is an insignificant accident in a vast, indifferent universe, and that knowledge of this truth is enough to destroy sanity.
The Comedy of Errors takes place in a single day in the Greek city of Ephesus, where two sets of identical twins, separated as babies, are mistaken for each other until the whole town seems bewitched. Egeon, an old merchant of Syracuse, has been arrested because the two cities are at war and any Syracusan found in Ephesus must pay a thousand marks or die.
The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's history of the Soviet system of prisons, labour camps and exile, which he likened to an archipelago of islands scattered across the country, visible only to those taken there. Written in secret between 1958 and 1968, it draws on Solzhenitsyn's own eight years as a prisoner and on the testimony of some two hundred and twenty-seven other former prisoners, together with published Soviet sources.
The Idiot tells what happens when a man of complete goodness and simplicity enters the money-driven society of St. Petersburg in the late 1860s. Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, the last of an old noble family, returns to Russia after four years in a Swiss sanatorium, where Dr. Schneider treated him for the epileptic illness that left him so slow as a child that people called him an idiot.
The Master and Margarita interweaves two stories: the visit of the Devil to Soviet Moscow in the 1930s and a novel about Pontius Pilate written by an unnamed author known as the Master. On a hot spring evening at Patriarch's Ponds, the literary bureaucrat Mikhail Berlioz and the young poet Ivan Bezdomny are discussing the non-existence of Jesus when a mysterious foreigner joins them.
The New York Trilogy gathers three linked short novels: City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room. Each begins from the materials of detective fiction and then dissolves the detective plot into questions of identity, authorship, language and mental disintegration.
The Rule of St Benedict is a concise manual for forming a stable monastic community. It opens by calling the monastery a school for the Lord’s service and asks what kind of person desires life.
This is the first of three volumes of Edward William Lane's translation of The Thousand and One Nights, made directly from the Arabic of the Cairo (Bulaq) printed edition and published in parts from 1838. The library text is the 1859 revision edited by his nephew Edward Stanley Poole, in the 1912 Chatto & Windus reissue with a preface by Stanley Lane-Poole.
The True Story of My Life is the autobiographical sketch Hans Christian Andersen wrote in 1846, at forty-one, for a collected edition of his works. He opens by calling his life a lovely story, happy and full of incident, and says it shows that a loving God directs all things for the best.
The Warden is a quiet institutional novel about conscience, reform and the human cost of public righteousness. Septimus Harding is the gentle precentor of Barchester Cathedral and warden of Hiram's Hospital, a charitable almshouse for twelve elderly men.
Walter Hartright, a young London drawing-master, is engaged through his Italian friend Professor Pesca to teach watercolour at Limmeridge House in Cumberland. Walking home across Hampstead Heath late on the night before he leaves, he is touched on the shoulder by a woman dressed entirely in white who asks the way to London and speaks fondly of Limmeridge; soon after, two men in a chaise ask a policeman whether he has seen a woman escaped from an asylum.
Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, translated by Haldane and Kemp as The World as Will and Idea, is Arthur Schopenhauer's single, systematic statement of a philosophy that he claimed expressed one thought from four sides. It appeared in December 1818 (dated 1819) in four books with an appendix criticising Kant, and in 1844 he added a second volume of fifty supplementary chapters keyed to the first.
Twelfth Night begins with shipwreck, loss, and disguise. Viola believes her brother Sebastian drowned, enters Illyria as Cesario, and serves Duke Orsino, who sends her to woo Olivia.
Walden; or, Life in the Woods is Henry David Thoreau's account of the two years and two months, from July 4, 1845, to September 1847, that he spent living alone in a one-room house he built himself beside Walden Pond, about a mile and a half south of the village of Concord, Massachusetts. He compresses the experiment into the cycle of a single year, moving from summer through winter to the thaw of spring, in eighteen chapters.
Nicholas Romeo, a man with a profound intellectual disability who could not speak and needed help with the most basic tasks, lived with his parents in Philadelphia until his father died in May 1974. His mother, unable to care for him or to manage his outbursts, asked a county court to admit him to a state facility, and in June 1974 he was committed to the Pennsylvania institution known as Pennhurst State School and Hospital.
Passages
- A Burnt-Out Case, Middle chapters
Colin's routine at the leproserie: dispensing drugs, examining patients, and planning facilities with Querry.
- A Treatise on Insanity, Treatment chapters
The discussion of regimen, baths, restraint, and moral management captures the therapeutic hopes and limits of asylum reform.
- Addington v. Texas, Opinion of the Court, Part III-A, paragraph beginning: At one time or another every person exhibits some abnormal behavior
The Court distinguishes ordinary unusual conduct from mental illness warranting confinement and warns against commitment based on isolated episodes.
- Addington v. Texas, Opinion of the Court, Part III-A, sentence beginning: Moreover, it is indisputable that involuntary commitment to a mental hospital
The Court recognizes the adverse social consequences, whether called stigma or otherwise, that follow involuntary hospitalization.
- An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Ch. XI, §12–13
Difference between 'naturals' (intellectual disability) and madmen; delusions such as believing oneself a king or made of glass; partial madness in otherwise sober people.
- Anne of Green Gables, Chapter II and V
Anne's account of the orphan asylum and her years as unpaid help in two households caring for children.
- As You Like It, Act 3, Scene 2
Rosalind calls love a madness deserving the dark house and whip, and claims to have cured a lover by counsel.
- Billy Budd and Other Stories, Bartleby, middle and end
Bartleby's escalating refusals, his living in the office, removal to the Tombs, refusal to eat and death against the prison wall.
- Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, Chapters on 1933
Bonhoeffer's stay at Bethel, its care of people with epilepsy and disabilities, and the drafting of the Bethel Confession.
- Buck v. Bell, Opinion of the Court, the statute's preamble: that experience has shown that heredity plays an important part in the transmission of insanity, imbecility, etc.
Holmes summarizes the legislative findings on heredity and the discharge of institutionalized patients, the hereditarian premises on which the statute rested.
- Buck v. Bell, Opinion of the Court, review of procedure: The superintendent first presents a petition to the special board of directors of his hospital or colony
The procedure by which an institution's superintendent initiated the operation and the board, courts and guardian reviewed it, a window on the authority of asylum administrators in the 1920s.
- Buck v. Bell, Opinion of the Court, closing paragraph: so far as the operations enable those who otherwise must be kept confined to be returned to the world, and thus open the asylum to others
Holmes links sterilization to the discharge of patients and the freeing of institutional beds, reflecting the period's view of the asylum's custodial role.
- Cannery Row, Chapters on Frankie
Frankie's devotion to Doc, his theft of a clock as a gift and his commitment to an institution.
- Ceremony, Opening section
Tayo's sleeplessness, nausea and flood of memories; his recollection of the VA hospital ward where he felt himself invisible.
- Chess, Dr B.'s narrative (isolation)
Months of solitary confinement in a hotel room with no books, no activity and no human contact beyond interrogation.
- David Copperfield, Ch. 14
Betsey explains that she rescued Mr Dick from an asylum his brother intended for him, and defends his sanity.
- Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias, Course and prognosis
Bleuler resists the idea that all cases end in inevitable dementia.
- Democracy in America, Prison-study background and institutional observations
The journey began with penal reform, connecting democracy to institutions of discipline and moral management.
- Description of the Retreat, Chs. 2-3
The institutional description makes architecture, air, garden access, and household order central to care.
- Dracula, Ch. 5–6, 8–9 (Seward's diary)
Seward's observations of Renfield: flies, spiders, sparrows, and his classification as a zoophagous maniac; Renfield's escape attempts toward Carfax.
- Early Poems: A Boy's Will, North of Boston, Mountain Interval, North of Boston, A Servant to Servants
The farm wife describes her exhaustion, her doctor's prescription of rest, her stay in the State Asylum, and her family's earlier practice of keeping a mad uncle caged in the house.
- Far from the Madding Crowd, Vol. II, Chs. IX–XI
Fanny's struggle along the Casterbridge highway to the Union-house, and the report of her death there.
- Far from the Madding Crowd, Vol. II, Ch. XXV
Discovery of Boldwood's locked closet of gifts, the petition on his mental state, and the reprieve to confinement during Her Majesty's pleasure.
- Humboldt's Gift, Middle sections
Humboldt's paranoid accusations, violence toward his wife, use of drink and pills, and commitment to Bellevue.
- Jane Eyre, Chapters XXVI-XXVII
Bertha is shown in her attic room with Grace Poole; Rochester recounts her family history of madness, his reasons for keeping her at Thornfield, and the hiring of her keeper from the Grimsby Retreat.
- Letters and Papers from Prison, Early letters to parents, April–May 1943
The first days of isolation in Tegel, physical conditions of the cell, and his deliberate adoption of routine.
- Leviathan, Part I, Ch. VIII
Madness as excessive passion; rage and melancholy; the man in Bedlam who claims to be God the Father; drunkenness; the Abdera fever epidemic and the hanging maidens of a Greek city.
- Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind, Treatment sections
Recommended bleeding, purging, restraint, and moral management raise major ethical issues.
- Mental Maladies, Asylum chapters
The institutional material treats space, classification, attendants, and medical authority as therapeutic instruments.
- Mental Pathology and Therapeutics, Therapeutics
The treatment chapters combine physical care, moral treatment, prognosis, and asylum organization.
- Mrs. Dalloway, Noon, Harley Street
Sir William Bradshaw's consultation, the decision to send Septimus to a country home, and the narrator's long passage on proportion and conversion.
- O'Connor v. Donaldson, Opinion of the Court, Part I, paragraph beginning: The evidence showed that Donaldson's confinement was a simple regime of enforced custodial care
The trial evidence on custodial care, the term milieu therapy as staff used it, and a ward of sixty patients, a record of state-hospital conditions in the 1950s and 1960s.
- O'Connor v. Donaldson, Opinion of the Court, Part II, paragraph beginning: A finding of "mental illness" alone cannot justify a State's locking a person up against his will
The Court's holding that a diagnosis by itself does not justify confinement of the harmless, with a caution about whether the term mentally ill can be given reasonably precise content.
- O'Connor v. Donaldson, Concurrence of Chief Justice Burger, Part II-A, paragraph beginning: That proposition is surely not descriptive of the power traditionally exercised by the States
Burger's history of the care of the mentally ill from poorhouses and jails through the rise of state institutions, citing Albert Deutsch's The Mentally Ill in America.
- Olmstead v. L. C., Opinion of the Court, Part II, paragraph beginning With the key legislative provisions in full view
Recounts the two women's voluntary admissions to a psychiatric unit and the years between their clinicians' recommendations and their placement in community programs.
- Olmstead v. L. C., Opinion of Justice Kennedy, paragraph beginning Beginning in the 1950's, many victims of severe mental illness
Summarizes the history and consequences of deinstitutionalization, relying on an American Psychiatric Association brief and a psychiatrist's critical assessment.
- Olmstead v. L. C., Opinion of the Court, Part III-A, paragraph beginning Consistent with these provisions, the State generally may rely
Holds that states may rely on the reasonable assessments of their own professionals in deciding who is qualified for community-based care.
- On Liberty, Ch. III, Of Individuality (with footnote 13)
Eccentric people risk a commission de lunatico; the footnote condemns trials in which ordinary peculiarities are paraded before juries as proof of insanity and imagines atheists placed in madhouses as a 'humane' persecution.
- Orthodoxy, Chapter II, The Maniac (opening)
Conversation with a publisher about self-confidence, prompted by an omnibus marked Hanwell; belief in oneself as a sign of insanity.
- Reflections on the Revolution in France, Opening pages, on congratulating France
Burke asks whether he should felicitate a madman escaped from the protecting restraint of his cell on his restoration to light and liberty.
- Six Characters in Search of an Author and Other Plays, Right You Are!, Act I
Signora Frola and Ponza each explain the household arrangement by attributing a fixed delusion to the other.
- St. Dymphna and the Geel Colony, Geel shrine and colony
Mentally afflicted pilgrims and boarders are lodged first near the shrine and later in family homes, creating a premodern alternative to confinement.
- St. Dymphna and the Geel Colony, Nineteenth-century psychiatric visits to Geel
Alienists and reformers used Geel as evidence in debates over asylum limits, moral treatment, and whether chronic mental illness required institutional segregation.
- The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, 'The Call of Cthulhu', Section I
Wilcox's fevered dreams and delirium; reports of worldwide nightmares, panic and asylum admissions among sensitives.
- The Comedy of Errors, Act 4, Scene 4
Pinch feels the patient's pulse, attempts an exorcism, and has the husband and his servant bound and confined in a dark room.
- The Comedy of Errors, Act 5, Scene 1
Antipholus of Ephesus describes Pinch as a hollow-eyed mountebank and fortune-teller and tells how he gnawed through his bonds in the dark vault.
- The Idiot, Part IV, Chapter VII and Conclusion
The seizure at the Epanchins' party, and Myshkin's final loss of understanding and return to Dr. Schneider's care in Switzerland.
- The Master and Margarita, Part One, Ch. 6–8
Ivan's arrival at the clinic in his underwear, his sedation, and his interview with Professor Stravinsky.
- The Master and Margarita, Part One, Ch. 13
The Master tells Ivan of his novel's persecution, his fear, the burning of the manuscript and his flight to the clinic.
- The New York Trilogy, City of Glass, Peter Stillman's history
Peter Stillman's childhood confinement by his father links language deprivation, abuse and religious theory.
- The Rule of St Benedict, Chapters 23–30
Correction and excommunication regulate disruptive behavior within a closed institution.
- The Thousand and One Nights (Lane's translation, Volume I), Chapter III, Story of the Envier and the Envied, with Note 63 (On Muslim Saints, or Devotees)
A king's daughter, possessed by a love-struck Márid, is cured by fumigation; Lane's note discusses insanity regarded as sanctity and confinement in the Máristán.
- The Thousand and One Nights (Lane's translation, Volume I), Chapter V, Story told by the Jewish Physician, with Note 47
The physician takes a pulse, prescribes, and is made superintendent of the hospital of Damascus; Lane's note on the first Muslim hospital (AD 706-7).
- The Thousand and One Nights (Lane's translation, Volume I), Chapter VII, Story of Ghánim the Son of Eiyoob
Ḳoot-el-Ḳuloob is drugged with benj and buried alive in a chest; later Ghánim, wasted by grief and hunger, is spared from the Baghdád hospital by a charitable sheykh.
- The True Story of My Life, Chapter I
The asylum garden, the harmless patients in the court, and the raving woman who reaches for the boy through her cell door.
- The Warden, Opening chapters
Hiram's Hospital is described as a charitable home for elderly men, establishing dependency, routine and institutional paternalism.
- The Woman in White, First Epoch, Hartright, IV
The escaped asylum patient on the Hampstead road and the two men who pursue her by chaise.
- The Woman in White, Second Epoch, Hartright's narrative; Third Epoch
Laura's confinement in the asylum under Anne's name, her rescue by Marian through a bribed nurse, and the effects of the ordeal on her memory and spirits.
- The World as Will and Representation, Third Book, §36
Genius and madness compared; theory of insanity as a broken thread of memory filled with fictions, giving rise to monomania, melancholy or folly; the difficulty of obtaining histories from asylum patients; madness as a refuge from unbearable grief.
- Twelfth Night, Malvolio enclosed
Twelfth Night gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens includes melancholy, love-sickness, feigned madness, confinement, and the social power to declare someone disordered
- Walden, Visitors
Simple-minded paupers from the almshouse visit the house, and Thoreau finds one of them more candid than most philosophers.
- Youngberg v. Romeo, Opinion of the Court, Part I, paragraph beginning At Pennhurst, Romeo was injured on numerous occasions
Describes the injuries and the complaint that led a mother to sue the administrators of the institution where her son lived, and the arm restraints later used in its hospital ward.
- Youngberg v. Romeo, Opinion of the Court, Part IV, at the sentence beginning In determining whether the State has met its obligations
Gives decisions of professional staff a presumption of correctness and acknowledges that such institutions were often overcrowded and understaffed.
- Youngberg v. Romeo, Concurrence of Justice Blackmun, paragraph beginning The second difficult question left open today
Raises whether training to preserve a resident's existing self-care skills, such as dressing and hygiene, is part of the minimally adequate care the Constitution requires.
Quotes
“a man who is very sober, and of a right understanding in all other things, may in one particular be as frantic as any in Bedlam”
Frequently cited
“Love is merely a madness, and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do”
“Were a stranger to drop on a sudden into this world, I would show him, as a specimen of its ills, a hospital full of diseases, a prison crowded with malefactors and debtors, a field of battle strewed with carcasses”
“My homicidal maniac is of a peculiar kind. I shall have to invent a new classification for him, and call him a zoöphagous (life-eating) maniac”
“If some man in Bedlam should entertaine you with sober discourse; and you desire in taking leave, to know what he were, that you might another time requite his civility; and he should tell you, he were God the Father; I think you need expect no extravagant action for argument of his Madnesse”
“Sir William said he never spoke of “madness”; he called it not having a sense of proportion.”
“they are in peril of a commission _de lunatico_, and of having their property taken from them and given to their relations”
“The insane are treated in a peculiar manner; it is only in the beginning that they are placed in an institution for observation; later they are given shelter in the homes of the inhabitants, take part in their agricultural labours, and are treated very kindly”
“My name is Legion: for we are many”
“suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence”
“That shape am I_, I felt, potentially”