Medical Jurisprudence of Insanity, described an apparent association between menstruation and fire setting, citing several cases ‘in which the incendiary propensity was excited by disordered menstruation, accompanied in some of them by other pathological conditions’.339
One particular case involved a 22-year-old woman who ‘committed three incendiary acts’ but ‘had had a disease two years before, that was accompanied by violent pains in the head, disordered circulation, insensibility, and epileptic fits; and that since then menstruation had ceased’:
That the evolution of the sexual functions is very often attended by more or less constitutional disturbance, especially in the female sex, is now a well-established psychological truth […]. Any irregularity whatsoever of the menstrual discharge, is a fact of the greatest importance in determining the mental condition of incendiary girls.
Ray also described a link between ‘the propensity to steal’ and ‘certain physiological changes’ in women, including pregnancy. He outlined the case of one ‘pregnant woman who, otherwise perfectly honest and respectable, suddenly conceived a violent longing for some apples from a particular orchard … and was detected by the owner in the act of stealing apples’. The woman was ‘convicted of theft’ but a ‘medical commission was appointed’ to review the matter:
Their enquiries resulted in the opinion that she was not morally free, and consequently not legally responsible while under the influence of those desires peculiar to pregnancy; adding that if Eve had been in the condition of the accused, when she plucked the forbidden fruit from the tree, the curse of original sin would never have fallen on the race.
Medical and judicial views on menstruation, pregnancy and childbirth were to remain highly relevant to issues of criminal responsibility in women throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century, especially in relation to infanticide. This emphasis was not, however, limited to the field of forensic psychiatry. Parry notes that the very idea of ‘moral insanity’ had particular implications for women in the Irish asylum system:
The concept of moral insanity, in essence denotes the re-conceptualisation of madness as deviance from socially-accepted behaviour, that is to say, traditional society was defined as normal, and violations of it labelled deviant. For women, this meant the risk of being labelled mad if one stepped outside the bounds of a very narrow definition of femininity […]. Moral management was designed to re-educate the mad into the conforming to society, in the case of the female, into conforming to the notion of the ‘ideal woman’.340
This situation had clear implications for treatment, as ‘moral management aimed to re-educate deviant women to conform to Victorian society. Of necessity, this meant educating women to conform to the ideals of the prevailing ideology of femininity. As a result of this, the treatment women received in Irish asylums, being orientated to this end, was essentially gendered’.341
The issue of gender was raised explicitly in 1891 by the Inspectors of Lunatics who reported that in Ireland 54 per cent of ‘pauper patients’ were male, compared to just 49 per cent in Scotland and 45 per cent in England:342
That the number of males admitted should exceed the females cannot be explained by any difference in the form of disease occurring in Ireland. On the contrary, we find that General Paralysis [neuropsychiatric disorder resulting from late stage syphilis] – a disease to which the male sex is particularly prone – occurs with much greater frequency in England and Scotland. […] The explanation of this relative excess of male patients would appear to us to be found in the cumbrous and difficult procedures necessary to obtain admission to public asylums in Ireland; so that the women, more easily controlled in their homes or contributing less to family support, remain at home or gravitate to the workhouses.343
The links between gender and women’s asylum experiences and, indeed, risk of committal, was by no means limited to Ireland, as interpretations of psychological distress in women differed systematically from those in men in many countries, especially as the profession of psychiatry emerged and established itself within the medical firmament during the 1800s and 1900s.344 This persisted beyond the 1800s: Hanniffy, for example, notes a diagnosis of ‘climacteric insanity melancholia’ in the records of St Fintan’s, Portlaoise in June 1924, apparently the first occurrence of a diagnosis linked to the menopause in the asylum’s books.345
More broadly, writing in the context of Enniscorthy Lunatic Asylum between 1916 and 1925, McCarthy notes that admissions of women were commonly related to menstruation, childbirth or miscarriage, and that single women often ended up drifting into the asylum in a lost, purposeless and generally unwanted state.346 In all, 56 per cent of women admitted to Enniscorthy between 1916 and 1925 were single and, like others so committed, they often struggled with impossible combinations of family misfortune, strict behavioural codes and expectations, economic uncertainty and social powerlessness.
Indeed, Parry argues that, from a gender perspective, the asylums ‘replicated the social structure of wider society’:
The administration of the system was predominately in the hands of men. Each asylum had a Board of Governors, made up of prominent men from the surrounding county. Rarely, if indeed ever, did a woman feature on these Boards – the prevailing ideology of femininity held women to be mentally and physically unsuited to public life, and hence to holding public posts. Except for the position of Matron, all top staff positions (Medical Superintendent, Clerk, Storekeeper) were all held by men. In the early days of moral management, when asylums were run by a Moral Governor, women had a certain amount of power in the asylum system in that the Governor’s wife usually superintended over the female wards. However, lay managers of asylums were gradually replaced by doctors as the century progressed, and simultaneously the role of matron declined in status. Medical superintendents believed they held their posts based on specific expertise, and hence could not justify their wives, in the absence of any expertise, holding any sort of managerial position in the asylum system.347
The fate of women in Irish asylums and the ways in which gender affected the development of the asylum system are fascinating themes that merit greater consideration.348 Particular attention could usefully be paid to specific, albeit difficult to research aspects of these themes such as the fate of babies born in the asylums349 and the experiences of children admitted to them.350 These are stories that need to be told.
3
PSYCHIATRY AND SOCIETY IN THE 1800S
Every Physician holding or accepting of an appointment [in a District Lunatic Asylum in Ireland], is requested to bear in mind that the object of the Government is not simply to have the bodily ailments of the Patients attended to, but to assist their recovery by moral or medical means, and to advance Medical Science in cases of Lunacy through the great range of experience which the Public Asylums afford.
Lord Lieutenant and Council of Ireland, General
Rules for the Government of All the District Lunatic
Asylums of Ireland, Made, Framed and Established
by the Lord Lieutenant and Council of Ireland (1843)1
The avowedly humanitarian approach to the mentally ill adopted by Hallaran in Cork in the late eighteenth century,2 consistent with Pinel in France3 and Tuke in England,4 was much needed in nineteenth-century Ireland owing not only to under provision for the mentally ill, but also the Great Irish Famine (1845–52). The Famine was one of the most devastating natural disasters in the history of modern Europe: between 1841 and 1851, the population of Ireland fell by approximately 20 per cent.5 Over a million Irish people died as a result of the Famine and one million more emigrated in its immediate
