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John Mason Cox, John Conolly, Henry Maudsley, and Alexander Morison have had considerable influence on the way in which other disciplines, literary criticism, in this case, have thought about relations between medical science and wider English culture in the period. Conolly and Maudsley are frequently cited as men whose medical theories were aided and prejudiced by literary stereotypes. Morison's highly influential work on the physiognomy of the insane has been seen as strong evidence of Victorian medicine's attachment to literary models of female insanity and to a coercively normative concept of femininity. On closer reading, far from simply confirming narrow nineteenth-century ideals of femininity, each of their works exhibits considerable ambivalence towards the most pervasive stereotype of female insanity, the love-mad woman; and rather than indicating unproblematic continuities between medical and literary culture, their use of literary allusion more generally is shaped by highly specific professional pressures.

This chapter examines discourses concerning child insanity in England during the 19th century. After Charles Darwin's publication of On the Origin of Species, the ideas of inheritance came to play an increasingly large role in psychiatric discourse. The common simile, that a child is like an animal, took on new literal forms. The first major statement on child insanity during this period came from Henry Maudsley's The Physiology and Pathology of the Mind. This was one of the first accounts that placed childhood mental disorders in an evolutionary perspective.

This chapter presents Henry Maudsley's discussion of melancholy. Living between 1835 and 1918, Maudsley oversaw and greatly shaped the development of British psychiatry in this crucial period. In the 1870s Maudsley was appointed to the chair of medical jurisprudence at University College, London, and he wrote extensively on legal and forensic matters during that period. One of Maudsley's themes was the physiological basis for all mental disorders. This emphasis is central in The Physiology and Pathology of the Mind, from which some excerpts are taken.

This chapter examines British psychiatrist Henry Maudsley's criticism on the science of child study during the beginning of the 20th century. In his address to the 1900 meeting of the Medico-Psychological Association, Maudsley launched a scathing attack on recent work on the psychology of children based on trying to imagine oneself as a child. Maudsley believed that study of the child mind should proceed through careful physiological observation of its movements, ‘for mental apprehensions are based on motor apprehensions’.

This book demonstrates medical arguments about the nature of the relationship between the physical, mental, and social aspects of men's and women's lives. Neurology is the branch of medicine that is central to this book. Here, the medical writers all move beyond the particulars of their specialisms to ponder ethical and philosophical questions raised by their scientific observations. William Carpenter, Thomas Laycock, and Henry Maudsley are three examples of doctors whose treatises on cerebral and neurological functioning slid almost imperceptibly into elegant disquisitions on the nature of consciousness and the elusive relationship of body and mind.

The book’s epilogue discusses Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray as a novel that forecasts a revitalized contemporary interest in the aesthetic implications of what has recently been called the “neural self.” Using notebooks Wilde kept as an Oxford student, the chapter traces Wilde’s interest in materialism to the scientific and philosophical accounts of matter promoted by Thomas Huxley, Henry Maudsley, and others. The epilogue briefly survey’s the book’s argument that aesthetic discourse provided nineteenth-century writers with a platform for exploring materialist accounts of human experience developed in physiological and evolutionary science. It then situates the book’s argument in relation to recent scientific approaches to humanistic inquiry, including neuroaesthetics, cognitive literary studies, and deconstructive approaches to neuroscience developed by Catherine Malabou. The chapter concludes by suggesting that returning to nineteenth-century configurations of the relationship between science and aesthetics are helpful for formulating less oppositional accounts of the humanities and sciences today.

The binary relationship between ‘intellectual disability’ and ‘mental illness’ is widely regarded as self-evident and long-established. This chapter demonstrates that the historical, and continuing, relationship between intellectual disability and psychiatry is, in fact, ambiguous and inconsistent. Beginning with the nosology of William Cullen in the latter part of the seventeenth century, the chapter explores the dispersal of madness across all the branches of disease and illness. The advent of alienism and Pinel’s nosology of madness, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, produced much flatter conceptual structures, in which idiocy was one of the various forms of madness. As psychiatry developed, the position of idiocy shifted. Maudsley located it in a separate branch, though still not separated in a binary manner from insanity. Lastly, the nosology of the neurologist Spitzka became more nuanced and layered, though still without a binary separation of idiocy. The chapter takes the view that the lack of any consistent underlying paradigm in psychiatry will continue to make the presence and position of intellectual disability impossible to fix. Psychoanalytic and neo-Jasperian psychiatry thoroughly exclude it as an object of investigation.