Hydropathy at home: the water cure and domestic healing in mid-nineteenth-century Britain

James Frame's The Philosophy of Insanity (1860)

Our aim in presenting this Classic Text is to foster wider analytical attention to a fascinating commentary on insanity by a former inmate of Glasgow Royal Asylum, Gartnavel, James Frame. Despite limited coverage in existing literature, his text (and other writings) have been surprisingly neglected by modern scholars. Frame's Philosophy presents a vivid, affecting, often destigmatizing account of the insane and their institutional provision in Scotland. Derived from extensive first-hand experience, Frame's chronicle eloquently and graphically delineates his own illness and the roles and perspectives of many other actors, from clinicians and managers to patients and relations. It is also valuable as a subjective, but heavily mediated, kaleidoscopic view of old and new theories concerning mental afflictions, offering many insights about the medico-moral ethos and milieu of the mid-Victorian Scottish asylum. Alternating as consolatory and admonitory illness biography, insanity treatise, mental health self-help guide, and asylum reform and promotion manual, it demands scrutiny for both its more progressive views and its more compromised and prejudicial attitudes.

Introduction The Crafting of Medicine in the Early Industrial Age

The special issue "Fitting for Health" offers a critical inquiry into the co-construction of medicine and technology in the early industrial age. It investigates the "social life" of medical things, through their material configuration, invention, improvement, and diversification, the sites of their deployment, their status as both novelties and less spectacular objects of everyday use, and the challenges they faced in fitting themselves into people's lives and European res publica. The set of articles (on steel trusses, medical electricity, anatomical models, and trade catalogs) heuristically uses "technology" to analyze how medicine and its material processes were crafted, endowed with meaning, and woven into European societies. Opening the medical "black box"—circumventing its tendency to be ignored as a mediating tool—provides a significant common point of entry for the four enquiries, triggering further analysis of the relationship between humans and non-humans as shaped in medical knowledge and practice.