ABSTRACT
This chapter emphasizes the departure from past practices that these new architectural responses to madness represented. The social architecture of mad space in nineteenth-century New Jersey was constructed through the consistent application of a variety of responses to those regarded as mad. The historical records relating to John Hughes’s changing state of mind indicate the co-existence of formal and informal spaces of treatment and care in nineteenth-century New Jersey. Confinement was a common enough practice in antebellum New Jersey that many witnesses in lunacy trials mentioned the fact without describing in any detail the nature of the confinement in question. The relationship between the mentally troubled and female primary caregivers was in fact central to the social organization of space for the mad in New Jersey. The chapter explores the many customary responses to madness in nineteenth-century New Jersey, and argues that they were woven together to form a 'social architecture' for the management of madness at the community level.
