Oh dear, this is so totally me
On FB somebody on my list posted one of those not necessarily entirely spurious but often dodgily described and attributed historical documents, this one of 'Causes of Admission to Lunatic Asylums' mid-C19th. (Not as clearly dodgy as what was given out as the alleged menu of a 1912 London brothel, with the prices given in $$.)
I'm not saying that the causes of insanity given can't be found in some casebook, for some institution, somewhere -
But okay, apart from the whole 'is this really an actual historical document?' thing*, this banged on that nerve which shrieks whenever anybody states (or assumes) that The Female Malady remains the Last Word on Victorian attitudes to gender and madness, and that this whole area, which has been a major subfield within the history of medicine for the past several decades, is pretty much untrodden territory.
So I delivered myself of several IAMC mini-essays on gender, national differences, etc, in Victorian psychiatry.
Is this Historiansplaining? Or can we call it by its good old name of Pedantry?
(But yes, masturbatory insanity [supposed] was absolutely a thing in the C19th.)
*It might be the list from the appendix to someone's PhD thesis of all the alleged reasons for admission in the casebooks of the institutions they were studying, or based on some such. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2586745.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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