“This explanation is intended to show the vast importance of reading and regulated study in the management of the insane. It opens up a thousand channels by which new and given impressions may be conveyed to the mind at the will, but without the apparent interference of the physician: it introduces moral medicine into the system [...] it soothes or animates, depresses or excites, instructs or amuses, and in some instances exposes the folly and fallacy of particular opinions [...] It is certainly as expedient to bestow care upon the Library as upon the Laboratory.”
Asylum Libraries is a website for “‘Library as Laboratory’: Moral Treatment, Patient Libraries and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Asylums”, a PhD project by Laura Gray Blair based at Queen Mary, University of London and funded by the Wellcome Trust.
The project examines the place of reading and writing in the nineteenth-century British and Irish asylum systems. It will explore the ways in which reading was viewed as simultaneously psychologically disruptive and restorative; how these effects were utilised as part of the therapeutic regime of ‘moral treatment’; and how patients experienced reading and writing during their institutionalisation.