ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ideas about spatial influences on behaviour, sensation, and treatment influenced moral management and asylum architecture in the nineteenth century. From a reading of its history there are two influences on the nineteenth-century asylum that can be easily recognized. First is the ‘cardinal importance’ of architecture. Second is the role of The York Retreat as a force in reforming the treatment of madness in Britain. Asylum reform in Britain followed a particular set of ideas that saw space, place, and design used as methods of treatment. By the mid-nineteenth century, the relationship between asylum design and its ability to affect treatment and cure were firmly rooted in the medical and architectural discourses of the day. By 1860, influenced by the treatment discourse forged at The Retreat, the architectural community rejected its design as being unsuitable for a lunatic asylum.
