ABSTRACT
As Robert Dingwall, Anne Marie Raerty and Charles Webster point out, ‘the contests over the interpretation of the history of mental disorder and the rise of psychiatry have been largely fought around the issues of psychiatric knowledge and of the rise of psychiatry as a speciality’, such accounts fail to consider the role played by the who came into daily contact with the mentally disordered, that is the nursing, or their predecessors, the attendants and keepers. In order to analyze the role of the attendant in the Victorian asylum, it is necessary to understand the context in which their role developed establishment of asylums for those deemed to be mentally ill is one of the most contentious issues in the history of mental health care. Male attendants were expected to supervise patients working on the farm, in the gardens or in the workshops and female attendants could be found with patients in the laundry and sewing rooms.
