ABSTRACT
The Victorian legal framework for insanity was finally abolished when the Lunacy Act 1890 was repealed by the liberalising Mental Health Act 1959. A similar statute removed the last vestiges of the Lunacy Act (Scotland) 1857. Parliament had accepted the premises of the Percy Commission that mental illness should be treated like physical illness, and that services should be developed in the community. Although these two aims dovetailed, they required very different professional and administrative effort. Changing the pattern of provision within the NHS would prove easier than persuading social services to provide for highly dependent people who had spent much of their lives in the mental institution.
