Jennifer Wallis‘s monograph Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum: Doctors, Patients, and Practices is out now!
Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum: Doctors, Patients, and Practices (Palgrave, 2017) considers how the body was examined – both before and after death – in the late Victorian asylum in Britain. Performing a chapter-by-chapter ‘dissection’ of the body, it considers how the patient’s skin, muscles, bones, brain, and bodily fluids were studied and came to inform contemporary theories about mental disease. Along the way, Wallis considers the historian’s emotional engagement with sources such as medical photographs, as well as how 19th-century asylum practice was shaped by interactions between doctor and patient.
