‘Library as Laboratory’: Moral Treatment, Patient Libraries and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Asylums (360G-Wellcome-212863_Z_18_Z)

This project will explore the ways in which reading was viewed as simultaneously psychologically disruptive and restorative within nineteenth-century asylums, and examine how reading was utilised through medical directives as part of the therapeutic regime. How did patients experience print culture within asylums during a period of increasing medicalisation of mental health treatment? I will gather a variety of perspectives on the psychological benefits and dangers of reading from nineteenth-century sources, both from asylum professionals and from cultural commentators, to contrast professional and lay attitudes towards reading as treatment. I will collect a large quantity of data from archival material from a representative sample of asylums across Britain. This dataset will allow me to make a comparison of the ways in which material was collected and made accessible to patients, and to identify the relationship between ‘ideal’ material and that consumed by patients. Finally, I will use asylum records and first-person writing by patients to assess actual patient experience of reading versus the ostensible provision, and evaluate the impact of location, gender and class on levels of access to reading. This project will challenge notions of the ‘failure’ of the moral treatment regime and examine an earlier history of reading-as-therapy.