Gerald N. Grob's Mental Institutions in America: Social Policy to 1875
has become a classic of American social history. Here the author
continues his investigations by a study of the complex
interrelationships of patients, psychiatrists, mental hospitals, and
government between 1875 and World War II. Challenging the now prevalent
notion that mental hospitals in this period functioned as jails, he
finds that, despite their shortcomings, they provided care for people
unable to survive by themselves. From a rich variety of previously
unexploited sources, he shows how professional and political concerns,
rather than patient needs, changed American attitudes toward mental
hospitals from support to antipathy.
Toward the end of the 1800s psychiatrists shifted their attention toward
therapy and the mental hygiene movement and away from patient care.
Concurrently, the patient population began to include more aged people
and people with severe somatic disorders, whose condition recluded their
caring for themselves. In probing these changes, this work clarifies a
central issue of decent and humane health care.
Gerald N. Grob is Professor of History at Rutgers University. Among his
works are Mental Institutions in America: Social Policy to 1875 (Free
Press), Edward Jarvis and the Medical World of Nineteenth-Century
America (Tennessee), and The State and the Mentality III (North
Carolina).
Originally published in 1983.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand
technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from
the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions
preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting
them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the
Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich
scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by
Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
