| Summary: | Ireland was the location of the earliest comprehensive public provision for the care and control of lunatics. Between 1817 and 1870 the British government in Ireland, through the chief secretary's office in Dublin, directed the establishment of 22 district lunatic asylums throughout the country. Initially welcomed by local gentry, clergy and judicial authorities, discontent with the institutions grew with the unceasing growth of asylum admissions after famine and the failure of the asylum to restore more than a small proportion of inmates to society. Political battles between central and local governments developed on the question of financial and administrative responsibility for the insane. This book examines the crisis through an analysis of the social function and context of the asylum. Institutionalism of a growing proportion of the Irish population proceeded particularly through judicial committal. A law which had been intended only for the detention of the 'dangerous lunatic' became the routine mode of dealing with a variety of ills from alcoholism to family violence. Overcrowding and institutional inertia had in effect confounded the plans and predictions of nineteenth-century bureaucrats and reformers while ensuring the increasing functional importance of the asylum in Irish society. -- Publisher description.
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