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Dirty Bread, Forced Feeding, and Tea Parties: the Uses and Abuses of Food in Nineteenth-Century Insane Asylums

Nineteenth-century psychiatrists ascribed to a model of health that was predicated on the existence of objective and strictly defined laws of nature. The allegedly “natural” rules governing the production of consumption of food, however, were structured by a set of distinctively bourgeois moral valu...

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Autor principal: Kearin, Madeline Bourque
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Springer US 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8901470/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31907702
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10912-019-09603-8
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author Kearin, Madeline Bourque
author_facet Kearin, Madeline Bourque
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description Nineteenth-century psychiatrists ascribed to a model of health that was predicated on the existence of objective and strictly defined laws of nature. The allegedly “natural” rules governing the production of consumption of food, however, were structured by a set of distinctively bourgeois moral values that demonized over-indulgence and intemperance, encouraged self-discipline and productivity, and treated gentility as an index of social worth. Accordingly, the asylum acted not only as a therapeutic instrument but also as a moral machine that was designed to remake lazy, indolent transgressors into useful, “decorous” citizens. Because the theory and mechanics underlying this machine seemed straightforward and self-evident to psychiatrists, they were confounded when the asylum failed to translate its ideals into reality. While psychiatrists tended to blame this failure on the intractable immorality and weakness of individual patients, particularly paupers and immigrants, a review of the various meanings and uses of food in the hospital reveals the fault lines that ran through the asylum’s ideological structure.
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spelling pubmed-89014702022-03-15 Dirty Bread, Forced Feeding, and Tea Parties: the Uses and Abuses of Food in Nineteenth-Century Insane Asylums Kearin, Madeline Bourque J Med Humanit Article Nineteenth-century psychiatrists ascribed to a model of health that was predicated on the existence of objective and strictly defined laws of nature. The allegedly “natural” rules governing the production of consumption of food, however, were structured by a set of distinctively bourgeois moral values that demonized over-indulgence and intemperance, encouraged self-discipline and productivity, and treated gentility as an index of social worth. Accordingly, the asylum acted not only as a therapeutic instrument but also as a moral machine that was designed to remake lazy, indolent transgressors into useful, “decorous” citizens. Because the theory and mechanics underlying this machine seemed straightforward and self-evident to psychiatrists, they were confounded when the asylum failed to translate its ideals into reality. While psychiatrists tended to blame this failure on the intractable immorality and weakness of individual patients, particularly paupers and immigrants, a review of the various meanings and uses of food in the hospital reveals the fault lines that ran through the asylum’s ideological structure. Springer US 2020-01-07 2022 /pmc/articles/PMC8901470/ /pubmed/31907702 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10912-019-09603-8 Text en © The Author(s) 2020 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) .
spellingShingle Article
Kearin, Madeline Bourque
Dirty Bread, Forced Feeding, and Tea Parties: the Uses and Abuses of Food in Nineteenth-Century Insane Asylums
title Dirty Bread, Forced Feeding, and Tea Parties: the Uses and Abuses of Food in Nineteenth-Century Insane Asylums
title_full Dirty Bread, Forced Feeding, and Tea Parties: the Uses and Abuses of Food in Nineteenth-Century Insane Asylums
title_fullStr Dirty Bread, Forced Feeding, and Tea Parties: the Uses and Abuses of Food in Nineteenth-Century Insane Asylums
title_full_unstemmed Dirty Bread, Forced Feeding, and Tea Parties: the Uses and Abuses of Food in Nineteenth-Century Insane Asylums
title_short Dirty Bread, Forced Feeding, and Tea Parties: the Uses and Abuses of Food in Nineteenth-Century Insane Asylums
title_sort dirty bread, forced feeding, and tea parties: the uses and abuses of food in nineteenth-century insane asylums
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8901470/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31907702
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10912-019-09603-8
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