![]() At first, alienists believed asylums were peaceful places where patients could be restored by 'moral treatment'. ![]() There was a new class of medical professional, the 'alienist' (later known as a 'psychiatrist'). ![]() Society did not understand the impact this would have on disabled and mentally ill people. The truly destitute would be helped, but only in the workhouse, where no one would want to stay for long. This happened largely because society now thought that giving financial relief to people in their own homes would encourage laziness. By 1900, more than 100,000 ' idiots and lunatics' were in 120 county pauper asylums. The able-bodied poor avoided them if they could, so disabled and mentally ill people were moved into them.Īt the beginning of the 19th century, a few hundred people were living in nine small charitable asylums. They were intended as miserable places to live, with Spartan conditions and harsh work regimes. The new workhouses were designed to root out 'shirkers and scroungers'. Earlier workhouses had housed the destitute disabled of the local parish, and their buildings were of a more humane design. New workhousesįollowing the 1834 Poor Law Act, 350 grim new workhouses were built, one within roughly every 20 miles. The asylum was something distant to marvel at, but not somewhere many 19th century people would ever want to live. 'From any of the great main lines of railway which run through the shire' proclaimed The Builder magazine in 1892, 'a traveller will be sure to spy, in some comparatively secluded position, a great group of buildings, which by their modern air …their tall chimney stacks and … their bulky water tower, seem to belong rather to the busy towns than to country seclusion.' This was the asylum.
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