**Recommended for seminar reading – aim to read as many of these items as possible before the seminar

* Good recommendations – one star: backup to seminar reading.

All the readings on the list will be valuablel, for further reading and essays, but some are targeted towards the seminar topic.

 

Many items are e-journals or e-books, but remember (when this is possible again!) to go to the library too - browsing can be valuable!

 

Books and articles are not listed alphabetically in the reading list, but organised around themes and periods. Make good use of journal literature; don’t rely on books only (e.g. History of Psychiatry, Medical History, Social History of Medicine, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Psychological Medicine, Journal of Social History, etc.). Most of the journals on the reading list are available electronically and can also be found in hard copy - many on the Second Floor of the Library (Science Section). Part of the remit of the module is to encourage you to trace and make use of further reading, so use bibliographies and footnotes to seek out material not on the reading list, especially for your essays. The reading list, though long, is not exhaustive – the literature on the history of insanity is simply colossal (especially for the 19^th century). Many medical periodicals are also available on line - e.g. the Lancet, British Medical Journal, British Journal of Psychiatry and its predecessor Journal of Mental Science. Its hard to keep up with these resources - there are many historical sources and secondary readings on googlebooks, archive.org and American Libraries, for example, so its always worth doing a search!

 

Click here for abbreviations used in the bibliography.

Click here for introductory and essential readings.

On-line Resources

Wellcome Library

http://wellcomelibrary.org (for access to Wellcome catalogue and Wellcome images. The Wellcome Library also has many e-books, digitised sources and a moving image collection (e.g. films on shell-shock). For those who can visit in person, it holds many archival resources and is a wonderful place to work. There is a huge digitisation project, the Digitised Mental Health Care archive, which has made the records of e.g. Ticehurst, Manor House Asylum, and the York Retreat available, as well as the archives of prominent psychiatrists, the Mental After Care Association, and MIND.

Via Warwick University Library

Medical journals (e-journals): includes Lancet, British Medical Journal (BMJ) ( available via JSTOR), Journal of Mental Science and many others

Newspapers - include The Times and many other large circulation newspapers though the years covered vary greatly. Nineteenth-Century British Newspapers, a collection of provincial newspapers which include reports on local asylums, court cases involving insanity plea, etc.

Databases include British Periodicals online (a huge range of periodical literature, general interest journals with numerous articles on mental health, asylums, etc) from the late seventeenth-century to the twentieth; ECCO (Eighteenth-Century Collections On-line); Dictionary of National Biography (for information on 'famous' figures e.g. John Conolly, Henry Maudsley); House of Commons Parliamentary Papers - a useful guide to this source is to be found on the Centre for the History of Medicine website (Warwick) http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/chm/events/ass/hcpp-handout.pdf (material on asylums, inquiries, legislation, Lunacy Commissioners and Board) and Old Bailey on-line.

Check out History Databases for more leads (via Library)

Modern Records Centre at Warwick. The archive contains rich holdings on the National Asylum Workers Union, Social Work archive, and much more. Search under Guide to to Resources on Mental Health.

Open Access (i.e. no need to go via University Library)

Eugenics Review is available electronically (this is hard to search, but a good place to look up specific articles)

American Libraries and archive.org two brilliant resources for books and articles (full text) (including many keynote psychiatric texts)

Victorian Web direct access to a rich range of medical and literary resources on health matters (essays and extracts) http://www.victorianweb.org/

The National Archives Discovery catalogue gives a massive amount of data on archival collections throughout England and Wales, access to resources and other databases http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/

Internet resources are plentiful, some are general, other sites focus on specific issues! Use them with discrimination. Useful sites are e.g.
Case Histories from the History of Psychiatry
Mental Health Time Line, Middlesex University
Literature, Arts and Medicine, New York University Database (search film, literature, etc with key words)

There are also numerous relevant films: The Madness of King George; One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest; The Snake Pit; Gaslight; Regeneration; Let there be Light; shell shock archival film