| Description |
1 online resource (xviii, 396 pages) : illustrations |
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text file |
| Summary |
"Whew! They going to send around here and tie you up and drag you off to Milledgeville. Them fat blue police chasing tomcats around alleys." 'Berenice in The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers A scathing and original look at the racist origins of the field of modern psychiatry, told through the story of what was once the largest mental institution in the world, by the prize-winning author of Memoir of a Race Traitor After a decade of research, Mab Segrest, whose Memoir of a Race Traitor forever changed the way we think about race in America, turns sanity itself inside-out in a stunning book that will become an instant classic. In December 1841, the Georgia State Lunatic, Idiot, and Epileptic Asylum was founded on land taken from the Cherokee nation in the then-State capitol of Milledgeville. A hundred years later, it had become the largest insane asylum in the world with over ten thousand patients. To this day, it is the site of the largest graveyard of disabled and mentally ill people in the world. In April, 1949, Ebony magazine reported that for black patients, "the situation approaches Nazi concentration camp standards ... unbelievable this side of Dante's Inferno." Georgia's state hospital was at the center of psychiatric practice and the forefront of psychiatric thought throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in America'centuries during which the South invented, fought to defend, and then worked to replace the most developed slave culture since the Roman Empire. A landmark history of a single insane asylum at Milledgeville, Georgia, A Peculiar Inheritance reveals how modern-day American psychiatry was forged in the traumas of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, when African Americans carrying "no histories" entered from Freedmen's Bureau Hospitals and home counties wracked with Klan terror. This history set the stage for the eugenics and degeneracy theories of the twentieth century, which in turn became the basis for much of Nazi thinking in Europe. Segrest's masterwork will forever change the way we think about our own minds.--EBSCOhost website. |
| Contents |
Preface : Georgia on my mind -- Introduction : Administrations of lunacy -- Part I : Asylum's antebellum origins. "Demonic and legionized, they entered" : Samuel Henderson, Supt. Cooper, and the American Journal of Insanity -- Asylum psychiatry and slavery : fellow travelers -- "Stark mad after negroes!" : the asylum's Georgis backstory -- Part II : Settler-colonial mind. "Confused Farragoes" and "mesmerized" alcoholics : Nancy Malone, John Wade, Cherokee removal, and slavery -- "Beat her with a wagon whip" : Frances Edwards, Mary Cobb Howell, and white wives' miseries -- Part III : Civil War, reconstruction, and "our disturbed country". "The great interests of our disturbed country" : Civil War and the Georgia asylum -- "Separate, unequal, and compulsory" : freedpeople enter the Georgia asylum -- "No history furnished" : Ku-Kluxing, lynching, and psychiatry's inter-psychic tomb -- "A witless woman's story" : Sue Pagan, Jane Stafford, and Belle Mitchell -- solidarity and a certain freedom in Atlanta -- Part IV : New science, old ideas. Georgia's segregated psychiatric fiefdom -- Dr. Koch and Supt. Powell : bacillus or emancipation -- "The problem"? -- Turn-of-the-century dreams : the fire this time, the asylum farm, and Supt. Powell's "operation of a certain class" -- Plantation -- asylum -- prison -- Part V : Jim Crowed psychiatric modernity. "It must be the boss at the other end" : psychiatry's black atlantic -- Abraham Lincoln Jones, Dr. Goldberger, and the asylum's epidemic violence -- Dora and the kindergarten teacher : (dis)abilities and eugenics -- "Exalted on the ward" : Mary Roberts and the asylum's epistemic violence -- Epilogue : Psychiatry's afterlives of slavery, our ecologies of sanity. |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| Local Note |
eBooks on EBSCOhost EBSCO eBook Subscription Academic Collection - North America |
| Subject |
Central State Hospital (Milledgeville, Ga.) -- History.
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Central State Hospital (Milledgeville, Ga.) |
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History. |
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Psychiatric hospitals -- Georgia -- Milledgeville -- History.
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Psychiatric hospitals. |
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Georgia -- Milledgeville. |
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Psychoanalysis and racism -- Georgia -- Milledgeville -- History.
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Racism -- Georgia -- Milledgeville -- History.
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Psychoanalysis and racism. |
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Georgia. |
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Racism. |
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HISTORY / Social History. |
| Genre/Form |
History.
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| Subject |
Racism. |
| Other Form: |
Print version: Segrest, Mab, 1949- Administrations of lunacy. New York : The New Press, 2020 9781620972977 (DLC) 2019048361 (OCoLC)1121285148 |
| ISBN |
9781620972984 (electronic book) |
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1620972980 (electronic book) |
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9781620972977 |
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1620972972 |
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