"They too easily believe what they hear" The Victorian Insane Asylum, Accountability and the Problem of Perception, 1845-1890.

In 1880 the medical profession extensively debated what it believed to be the causes of the public's perception of the insane asylum. The conclusions they came to suggested that the public had fatally misunderstood the nature of asylumdom, accountability, and the complexities of managing lunacy. Elements of the medical profession were quick to blame the failings in the legal provision for madness, for this problem of perception, exonerating themselves in the process.

By charting the development of the asylum throughout the latter half of the 1800s as a legal entity, the ways in which the framework was applied on a daily basis by the medical profession will enable this thesis to compare their perception of themselves against that which the public held. Furthermore, it will question whether the problem of perception was a construction of the medical profession, a result of their personal pride and ambition, or whether the public truly feared the stories of abuses and wrongful confinement which littered papers and fiction throughout the period.