‘Ireland’s crowded madhouses’: The institutional confinement of the insane in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland

Abstract

In 1921 the popular Irish novelist known as George A. Birmingham published a short story entitled ‘A Lunatic at Large’. This concerns a young Englishman working as a dispensary doctor in the west of Ireland. Although only recently appointed to the post, Dr Lovaway has already been startled at the number of lunatics he is being called upon to certify, especially by the police. Indeed, as the story begins he is in the process of attempting to compose an article entitled, ‘The Passing of the Gael. Ireland's Crowded Madhouses’ for the British Medical Journal. He ponders various explanations for this startling phenomenon. He balanced theories. He blamed tea, inter-marriage, potatoes, bad whisky, ..