Madness, Architecture and Built Environment Psychiatric Spaces in Historial Context

Madness, Architecture and the Built Environment explores the spaces in which those labelled 'mad' have been treated and confined. Buildings (whether asylums, psychiatric clinics, or people's homes) have for centuries been seen as offering crucial tools for those treating madness and as presenting potent hazards to mental health. The essays in this volume unpack the social and political contexts and subtexts of the architecture-madness link.The fifteen essays are divided into six sections. The first includes analysis of asylum and clinic-building practices in early modern Holland, early nineteenth-century Britain and late nineteenth-century Germany. This is followed by three case studies of individual British asylums. The next section applies spatial analysis of contexts beyond the institution where patients were treated, in the US and Britain. Race and space in colonial asylums in India and South Africa form the focus of the following section. The fifth and sixth sections deal with various players, apart from psychiatrists, involved in the design and interpretation of psychiatric spaces: professional architects, psychiatric nurses and patients themselves.As a whole, the volume engages and rethinks the work of Michel Foucault and Thomas Markus on the spaces of madness, and represents the first effort to collect the work of many of the major scholars in the field. Contributors include historians of medicine, historians of architecture, geographers, sociologists and psychologists from five countries. The book will appeal to students and scholars in all these areas.Topp, Leslie is the author of 'Madness, Architecture and Built Environment Psychiatric Spaces in Historial Context', published 2007 under ISBN 9780415375290 and ISBN 0415375290.