Last updated: July 31, 2015


Health Problems

How mental health was dealt with in the 19th century

mental illness

For years, the topic of mental health was taboo. Picture: Karen Dodd Source: The Advertiser

Inconvenient People

Inconvenient People, by Sarah Wise.

TRY to imagine the scene.

You're strolling along the street, wondering whether to visit a friend or go to the smart new emporium for some dress material, and - shock! - you suddenly hear the drumming of hooves, a carriage door banging open, and hurried footsteps. Rough hands seize hold of you, and drag you away.

With horror, you recognise the doctor your grim-faced husband took you to because you were over-tired and difficult.

You can't escape. The pale faces of passers-by are the last thing you see as you're bundled into the carriage. You hear somebody call out: 'Poor mad creature!' as you whirl off towards imprisonment in the brutal madhouse.

That's how easily it was done in the 19th century. Unscrupulous family members only had to pay a couple of medical men (who may or may not have been quacks) to have an 'inconvenient' relative confined to an asylum.

The reasons they gave for signing the certificate were often entirely spurious, such as: 'She has certain impressions with regard to certain people which are not accurate.'

As historian Sarah Wise explains: 'An unloved mother could have her uncontrollable mouth, extreme moodiness and periods of confusion - caused by an unhappy marriage, illness and old age - turned against her for financial gain.'

Fascinating and chilling, Inconvenient People reads like a series of Victorian novels in brief - only all the tales are true. Each chapter is like a complex costume drama, involving plots, firearms, escapes, pursuits, confrontations, angry crowds, abandonment, terror and despair. Sarah Wise has uncovered some real horror stories.

On May 8, 1846, for example, octogenarian Catherine Cummings was teaching the daughter of one of her servants to write - hardly the action of a dangerous madwoman - "when two female strangers and two policewomen entered the room, threw a straitjacket over Mrs Cummings . . . and bundled her into a waiting carriage. A shawl was wrapped around her head to stifle her screams and she was forced down into the footwell of the vehicle."

Later Mrs Cummings's lawyer was refused access to her, but by contrast her accusers (her grasping sons-in-law, seeking control of the family finances) hired three lawyers and four doctors to prove the old lady was mad.

Parents could be equally harsh. The celebrated Edward Davies case involved a domineering mother who tried to have her son declared insane because of severe disagreements over the running of the successful family tea business. Edward's stress and helpless panic led to odd behaviour; he was clearly one of life's eccentrics. But was this due to his mother's tyranny?

Whatever the truth, she hired an eminent doctor to examine him on the pretext of a sore throat, and he just happened to bring along a 'friend' - who turned out to be the famous 'alienist' or 'mad doctor' George Man Burrows.

Burrows owned 'The Retreat' - a private asylum considered one of the best-run of London's 40 or so. In 1929 they detained around 2,000 patients, and Sarah Wise is careful to point out that (contrary to popular misconception) there were more men than women.

What happened to Edward Davies became known as being 'Burrowsed' - he was seized publicly in a coffee shop and dragged off, despite the vociferous intervention of the crowd, which often gathered in these cases and was generally on the side of the underdog. His case became a cause célèbre in that it was the first big test of the 1828 Madhouse Act.

But the behaviour of Burrows (and others like him) was a disgrace. He was driven by bizarre convictions, and considered normal eccentricity to be clear proof of madness. Chillingly he wrote: 'Individuals are often distinguished by a singularity either of ideas or pursuits; or by an equipage or dress unlike any other.'

On those grounds, London's Portobello Market would be deemed full of lunatics every single Saturday - and so would most literary parties! Burrows also believed that mad people gave off their own distinctive smell. 'Diagnosis by sniffing' as Sarah Wise puts it, in one of her many witty asides, made this man as revered as he was rich.

By the mid-century, public and professional opinion was moving against the status quo. In 1858 a wise newspaper editorial opined: 'It is so easy to prove that an obnoxious relative is insane...easier still to aggravate trivial symptoms by persistent bad treatment.'

The lurid publicity of these cases make our own newspapers seem like parish magazines - yet they served to alert an increasingly literate electorate to the gross injustices perpetrated under the existing lunacy laws.

But it's chilling to note that the 'reforming' Lunacy Act of 1880 in the UK remained in force until as late as 1959, and men and women went on being locked up (sometimes for decades) for pitiful 'wrongs' like having babies out of wedlock and petty crime.

Nobody interested in mental health should miss this book. It stands as a chilling reminder that without the strictest legislation, difficult, eccentric or disturbed people could once again fall prey to heartless relatives whose duty should be to protect them. We should never be complacent.

Available on Amazon, $30 RRP