ABSTRACT
One productive way to think of the rise of psychiatry during the nineteenth century is to see it as a product of a medical desire to differentiate and specialize. As medical models of the body and mind gathered empirical characteristics, the biological notion of the ‘feeble-minded’ developed to accompany other newly outlined categories, such as the ‘degenerate’ and ‘deviant’ (and indeed that of the ‘idiot’), which extended and complicated earlier ideas of ‘madness.’ As these terms 46suggest, much of the point of such vocabularies was to articulate processes of social control, and the links between ‘mental deficiency’ and criminality were ever present. A notable by-product of such a desire for control was the development of the asylum as a space of separation, a site where those with cognitive difference were sequestered in the name of a greater social good. But the asylum also became a space of study, as ‘confinement’ allowed for detailed examination of those inside. More than ever before, doctors now had the opportunity to observe and to refine their diagnostic criteria. The nineteenth-century asylum was many things, but one of these was a laboratory for psychiatric research.
