ABSTRACT
Much has been written about growth of central administration in nineteenth-century England, and study of the Lunacy Commission provides further comparative material, while highlighting several new issues. In view of fact that none of its medical commissioners had experience as asylum superintendents, one would have expected considerable resistance to new commission from practitioners managing asylums in both the public and private sectors of psychiatry, who had their own systems of care to defend. Lord Brougham’s 1832 Act for Care and Treatment of Insane Persons effected a compromise by reducing lay commissioners and increasing the professionals. In the late 1850s, James Huxley was one of a number of doctors who began to voice serious misgivings about relationship developing between the commission and practitioners working in county asylums. Huxley saw board’s desire for uniformity as thin end of the wedge, claiming that ‘a slavish bowing down’ was what they wanted as the ‘best preparation of the soil, for their crop of encroachments’.
