Introduction

A major movement in the history of insanity and asylums, and most particularly in the history of the fraught power relations between psychiatrists and their patients, has been the investigations of the sexing and gendering of mental maladies. One of the abiding myths about insanity and asylums has been that of a total reform of the treatment of the insane at the turn of the nineteenth century, a ‘new dawn’ of benevolence and scienti c medical treatment. A large proportion of therst wave of British revisionist studies of asylums and insanity was concerned almost exclusively with English history. Scholars such as Roy Porter, Jonathan Andrews and Oonagh Walsh have been instrumental in broadening theeld of study to include the di erent experiences of the United Kingdom’s peripheries–Ireland, Scotland and Wales, whilst Shula Marks and Waltrand Ernst, for example, have found di ering ideologies and regimes operating in Britain’s colonies during the Victorian era.