This bibliography is a directory of peer-reviewed scholarship about the history and culture of asylums and psychiatric custodial institutions in the United States. Some of these articles and books pertain to single institutions, while others consider asylum networks or practices which ranged across institutional, state, and national lines. Taken together, these works help us understand the texture of daily life in a custodial psychiatric insitution and how those institutions developed as a network of medical care and abuse in the nineteenth century.
These are all secondary materials written about the institutions themselves: scientific research papers about research performed on patients or using patient groups have been omitted.
Sources for General Information:
Yanni, Carla (2007). The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States. Minnesota University Press. ISBN 978-0-8166-4940-2.
Braslow, Joel T.. Mental Ills and Bodily Cures: Psychiatric Treatment In the First Half of the Twentieth Century. University of California Press, 1997, doi: 10.1525/9780520917934.
Hansen, Randall, and Desmond King. “Postwar Sterilization: Institutions and Abuse.” Sterilized by the State, Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 222–36, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139507554.015.
Melling, J. & Forsythe, B. (1999). Insanity, institutions, and society, 1800-1914: A social history of madness in comparative perspective. Routledge.
Savitt, T., & Savitt, T.J. (2006). Race and Medicine in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century America. The Kent State University Press.
Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: a History of Insanity In the Age of Reason. Vintage Books, 1973.
Goffman, Erving. Asylums: Essays On the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. Aldine Pub. Co, 1962.
Rondinone, Troy. Nightmare Factories: the Asylum In the American Imagination. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019.
Reiss, Benjamin. Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture. University of Chicago Press, 2008, Universal Product Code: 40015793990.
MURRAY, HEATHER. ASYLUM WAYS OF SEEING: Psychiatric Patients, American Thought and Culture. UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA PR, 2021.
Tomes, Nancy, . The Art of Asylum-Keeping: Thomas Story Kirkbride and the Origins of American Psychiatry. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016, doi: 10.9783/9781512808384.
Sources by Institution:
The Alabama Insane Hospital—Mount Vernon
Condom, Jaime E. “The Treatment Program at Searcy Hospital Before and After Wyatt.” Hospital & Community Psychiatry, vol. 28, no. 5, 1977, pp. 370–71, https://doi.org/10.1176/ps.28.5.370.
Alabama Insane Hospital—Tuscaloosa
“Survival at the Alabama Insane Hospital, 1861-1892” published in Journal of the Hisotry of Medicine and Allied Sciences by Bill L. Weaver, 1996.
Camp, Joseph. An Insight Into an Insane Asylum. University of Alabama Press, 2010.
Caitlin Burns. “ETHICS AND ACCESS IN MENTAL HEALTH ARCHIVES.” Ethics and Representation in Feminist Rhetorical Inquiry, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021, pp. 108-, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1w0xckn.10.
Arizona Territorial Hospital
Whiteside, Dora. Arizona Territorial Hospital Records 1890-1910 of Yavapai County, Prescott, Arizona, 1895.
Stockton State Hospital
Joel Braslow. “Surgery as Discipline: Lobotomy at Stockton State Hospital.” Mental Ills and Bodily Cures, 1st ed., University of California Press, 2023, pp. 125-.
Thompson, Faith Elise. “Light at the Top: PSYCHIATRIC NURSING STOCKTON STATE HOSPITAL.” Journal of Psychosocial Nursing and Mental Health Services, vol. 3, no. 6, 1965, pp. 509–13, https://doi.org/10.3928/0279-3695-19651101-07.
Wellerstein, Alex. “States of Eugenics: Institutions and Practices of Compulsory Sterilization in California.” Reframing Rights, The MIT Press, 2011, pp. 29-, https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262015950.003.0019.
Hartford Retreat
Goodheart, Lawrence B. “Insane Acquittees and Insane Convicts: The Rationalization of Policy in Nineteenth-Century Connecticut.” History of Psychiatry, vol. 28, no. 4, 2017, pp. 410–26, https://doi.org/10.1177/0957154X17719175.
Clouette, B., and P. Deslandes. “The Hartford Retreat for the Insane: An Early Example of the Use of ‘Moral Treatment’ in America.” Connecticut Medicine, vol. 61, no. 9, 1997, pp. 521-.
GOODHEART, LAWRENCE B. “From Cure to Custodianship of the Insane Poor in Nineteenth-Century Connecticut.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, vol. 65, no. 1, 2010, pp. 106–30, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jrp036.
GOODHEART, LAWRENCE B. “The Concept of Insanity: Women Patients at the Hartford Retreat for the Insane, 1824-1865.” Connecticut History, vol. 36, no. 1, 1995, pp. 31–47, https://doi.org/10.2307/44369409.
Goodheart, Lawrence B.. Mad Yankees: the Hartford Retreat for the Insane and Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry. University of Massachusetts Press, 2003.
Georgia State Sanitarium
Georgia College project: https://georgialibraries.omeka.net/s/central-state-hospital/page/introduction
Segrest, M. (2020). Administrations of lunacy : racism and the haunting of American psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum. The New Press.
Lane, L. W. (1994). Posey with the insane and sane : forgive and be forgiven. Old Capital Press.
Ziff, K. K., & ProQuest. (2012). Asylum on the Hill: History of a Healing Landscape. Ohio University Press.
Smith, Kylie. Jim Crow in the Asylum, UNC Press, Forthcoming. https://manifold.ecds.emory.edu/projects/jim-crow-in-the-asylum/