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Social History of Medicine Advance Access originally published online on February 21, 2006
Social History of Medicine 2006 19(1):55-71; doi:10.1093/shm/hkj008
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Social History of Medicine. All rights reserved

The Asylum, the Poor Law, and a Reassessment of the Four-Shilling Grant: Admissions to the County Asylums of Yorkshire in the Nineteenth Century

Robert Ellis*

* University of Huddersfield, School of Music and Humanities, Division of History, Queensgate, Huddersfield HD1 3DH, UK. E-mail: r.ellis{at}hud.ac.uk

In the mid-1870s, the British government introduced a grant that transferred a proportion of the cost of asylum care from local to central funds. Typically, this has been seen by contemporary and more recent commentators as part of the explanation for the therapeutic failure of the County and Borough Asylums, and for their degeneration into custodial institutions. Building on recent work on the Poor Law, the aim of this article is to reassess the impact of the grant using both quantitative and qualitative evidence. Contrasting the records of two County Asylums with the annual reports of the Lunacy Commissioners, it shows that there is little evidence to suggest that the grant was responsible for a change in either the size or composition of the asylum population. Ultimately, it argues that the admission of patients in general, and the admission and discharge of chronic cases in particular, rested with longer-term factors than simply the introduction of one fiscal incentive.

Keywords: County Asylum; insanity; lunacy; Poor Law; 1874; hereditary; history of psychiatry; Yorkshire


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