From the time of his dissertation Peter's main interest as a social historian was insanity and its treatment. His 1974-dissertation dealt with Insanity and Society: A Study of the English Lunacy Reform Movement, 1815-1870 (University of Wisconsin). He is currently working more generally on the history of disease experience, but between then and now his studies in Charleston led him to investigate insanity and society no longer in the context of Modern British History but in Southern Studies. This investigation culminated in the publication of his book Moonlight, Magnolias, and Madness: Insanity in South Carolina from the Colonial to the Progressive Eras (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). As the full-sounding title suggests, the book tells a rich and fascinating story. Along the way it debunks a series of preconceptions or myths. In his presentation, Peter highlighted some of them for our discussion.
According to the received view, the developments in the South always followed those in the North and are notable at best for lagging behind. As one might expect, the picture is really much more complicated and interesting. For one, it is not at all clear that the South was following the North. South Carolina's State Lunacy Asylum, for example, was built in 1828 and was only the third of its kind in the States. Also, the developments in the South were distinctive in other ways than just being backwards. This distinctiveness owed itself to general therapeutic precepts, such as: "Owing to climatic, geographical, nutritional, and cultural conditions, Southern patients need to be bled less but purged more than Northern patients." It also affected the politics of insanity and its treatment. Some anti-abolitionists argued, for example, that slavery is beneficial for physical and mental health (e.g., Simms in The Morals of Slavery) and were prone simply to blind themselves to the fact of insanity among the black population.
Another erroneous preconception considers this social history strictly as an American affair. Peter's research shows patterns of European influence, finding on the one hand that Freud had practically no impact before 1920, finding on the other hand that many European ideas influenced Medical (purging, bleeding) and Moral (gardening, music, education) Treatments. For some of these influences see also Peter's 1992 article "Mesmerism and Phrenology in Antebellum Charleston: 'Enough of the Marvellous'" (Journal of Southern History, 58: 199-230).
If only for methodological reasons, some preconceptions are harder to dispel than others. The notion that the history of insanity is an institutional history of the hospital and the insane asylum has much of the documentary evidence on its side. While, in fact, most people were cared for outside the institutions, records of cases and their treatments in bureaucratic institutional settings are far more extensive and complete and far more easily accessible than records of cases in private care. Here, the historian must rely on lucky finds in preserved family-correspondences and the like.
Finally, Peter addressed a fairly new and somewhat fashionable myth, namely Michel Foucault's influential interpretation of the history of insanity as a history of social control, as a medicalized form of power which delimits the mainstream from the fringe, the normal from the pathological. While Peter recognizes this dimension in the history of South Carolina, he also emphasizes the genuine "therapeutic optimism" which informed many initiatives, proposals and treatments: Even some of those interventions which sound rather misguided, if not brutal to us were motivated by the hope that the patient might be cured and reintegrated into society. Also, it is interesting to witness that the practitioners at the time were themselves sometimes conflicted about what they were doing. Since a synopsis like this can never substitute for the wealth of telling detail, here a concluding reference to an article in which Peter addresses "The Victorian Debate over the Prevention of Wrongful Confinement": "Dangerous to Themselves and Others" appeared in 1983 in the Journal of British Studies, 23:85-104.
Alfred Nordmann
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