Sex, Religion, and the Making of Modern Madness: The Eberbach Asylum and German Society, 1815-1849
Author: Ann Goldberg
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Edition: N/A
Publication Date: 2001-02-22
Language: English
Paperback: 252 pages
ISBN-10: 0195140524
ISBN-13: 9780195140521
Book Description
How did the affliction we now know as insanity move from a religious phenomenon to a medical one? How did social class, gender, and ethnicity affect the experience of mental trauma and the way psychiatrists diagnosed and treated patients? In answering these questions, this important volume mines the rich and unusually detailed records of one of Germany’s first modern insane asylums, the Eberbach Asylum in the duchy of Nassau. It is a book on the historical relationship between madness and modernity that both builds upon and challenges Michel Foucault’s landmark work on this topic, a bold study that gives generous consideration to madness from the patient’s perspective while also shedding new light on sexuality, politics, and antisemitism in nineteenth-century Germany.
Drawing on the case records of several hundred asylum patients, Sex, Religion, and the Making of Modern Madness reconstructs the encounters of state officials and medical practitioners with peasant madness and deviancy during a transitional period in the history of both Germany and psychiatry. As author Ann Goldberg explains, this era witnessed the establishment of psychiatry as a legitimate medical specialty during a time of social upheaval, as Germany underwent the shift toward a capitalist order and the modern state. Focusing on such “illnesses” as religious madness, nymphomania, and masturbatory insanity, as well as the construct of Jewishness, she probes the daily encounters in which psychiatric categories were applied, experienced, and resisted within the settings of family, village, and insane asylum.
The book is a model of microhistory, breaking new ground in the historiography of psychiatry as it synthetically applies approaches from “the history of everyday life,” anthropology, poststructuralism, and feminist studies. In contrast to earlier, anecdotal studies of “the asylum patient,” Goldberg employs diagnostic patterns to illuminate the ways in which madness–both in psychiatric practice and in the experience of patients–was structured by gender, class, and “race.” She thus examines both the social basis of rural mental trauma in the Vormärz and the political and medical practices that sought to refashion this experience.
This study sheds light on a range of issues concerning gender, religion, class relations, ethnicity, and state-building. It will appeal to students and scholars of a number of disciplines.
Review
“This is a taut, concise and well-written analysis. It is also a richly nuanced and multilayered study, at once theoretically sophisticate and concretely historical.”– Journal of Modern History
“Goldberg’s remarkable study of mental illness in early nineteenth-century Germany places the phenomenon of insanity squarely within the context of a late absolutist regime and a crisis-ridden, impoverished social and economic order. Her account of the gendered structuring of madness, its bureaucratic politics, and its connections to religious enthusiasm and religious prejudice offers an unexpected but extraordinarily illuminating insight into state and society in Germany before the revolution of 1848.”–Jonathan Sperber, University of Missouri
“Goldberg’s enterprise is an original and long-missed contribution to the social and cultural history of madness in the first half of the nineteenth century. Her work provides at the same time valuable insights into the broader field of the history of peasant culture and social experience, especially in the rural world of Nassau. The strength of Goldberg’s work is an outstanding and sensitive interpretation of the individual’s experience of madness as a language of distress and dissent in rural lower-class culture that was shaped by gender and ethnicity.”–Doris Kaufmann, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin
“Ann Goldberg’s new book opens a challenging new dimension of nineteenth-century German social history. We’ve had histories of asylums and medicalization in other national fields for some years, likewise a profusion of works on the formation of Germany’s bourgeois culture. There is even the kernel of a literature on early nineteenth-century German rural society. Now Goldberg has beautifully brought together these concerns. This fascinating exploration of sexualities, religion, and the modern pedagogies of order takes us to the frontier of bourgeois culture and rural society, where ordinary people learned how to be ill. This is a ‘micro’ history that compels the ‘macro’ to listen.”–Geoff Eley, The University of Michigan
“In giving a prominent voice to patient and village life, she [Goldberg] reveals not only the medical but the social construction of ‘madness,’ made vivid through her detailed rendering of the immense strains of impoverished rural life for Germans of the early nineteenth century.”–Susan Lanzoni, Journal of Asian History
About the Author
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