The first dedicated book on public mental hospital services in England in the decade following World War I.

Petty Tyranny and Soulless Discipline? examines England’s public mental hospitals for the working class after World War I. Claire Hilton combines narratives of patients’ difficult daily lives with an analysis of competing agendas from campaigners, the government, and new medical knowledge to build a complex picture of mental health provision. Patient experiences, including their admission, care, treatment, discharge, and sometimes death, are illuminated in previously unexplored primary sources and situated within the broader context of reform and change (or lack thereof). While offering a comprehensive history of psychiatric care in early twentieth-century England, the book also draws on historical insights to reflect on contemporary mental health practices, making it relevant to historians, mental health professionals, and patients alike.

Claire Hilton is an honorary research fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, and an honorary archivist at the Royal College of Psychiatrists, London.

List of figures
List of tables
List of abbreviations
Preface
Foreword
Acknowledgements

1 Introduction: historical context and methodological considerations
2 Outside to inside: public experience and understanding, and into the mental hospital
3 Certified under the Lunacy Act: patients’ daily life in hospital, and after
4 Challenges for the mental hospital doctors: medical knowledge and treating patients
5 Regulatory culture: structure and staff
6 Reform
7 Epilogue: reflections then and now

References
Index