This paper focuses on the professional development of English psychiatry in the early twentieth century, but its narrative diverges from past studies of nineteenth-century psychiatrists that emphasised their monopoly and social control. As suggested in a recent volume of Medical History, historians of psychiatry who study the twentieth century should account for ‘the development of value systems within each of these professional communities and programme groupings and for the changing patterns of interactions between professional groups, exploring not only the training regimes but also the patterns of recruitment into different professions’. Importantly, asylums and psychiatrists devised their own strategies to develop their status and interests asylums pursued commercial interests in their admission policies for institutional survival, while psychiatrists promoted a process of professional development to defend their living as doctors. Meanwhile, psychiatrists were under pressure from opposition to private asylums and the stigma of pauperised public asylums. In this period, asylums continued to increase their beds and patients, and more doctors joined the field of psychiatry. The shift in historians’ concerns, however, does not legitimise ignorance of asylums and their doctors in the early twentieth century. Footnote 6 These studies show a shift in concern away from asylums and their doctors to other environments. Footnote 5 Louise Westwood and Edgar Jones have focused on a new kind of site of psychiatric treatment: the former on a hospital for neurotic women, the latter on a research-oriented hospital for mental diseases. ![]() Historians such as Nikolas Rose and Matthew Thomson have discussed the rise of psychology as a marked phenomenon of the first part of the twentieth century, moving away from asylums, psychiatry and its profession. Footnote 4 Such studies have estranged historians of psychiatry from the profession and they are also found in the studies of twentieth-century English psychiatry. Footnote 3 However, Roy Porter and historians following in his wake have argued in important studies on the rise of nineteenth-century lunatic asylums that English psychiatry cannot be framed so strongly in terms of coercive motives of social control, a capitalistic social structure or professional interests in monopolising the psychiatric market. Footnote 2 For example, Andrew Scull has written a number of seminal works that show how psychiatrists worked in lunatic asylums, and struggled for status, economic success and autonomy. Some studied it to understand the great past or the deplorable situations that were improved in later periods, Footnote 1 while others explored psychiatry from the perspective of social history, under the influence of Michel Foucault. The profession of psychiatry was once a major target for researchers. This interest of mine comes from the past historiography of English psychiatry. This paper revisits the profession of English psychiatry to explore its development in a relatively uncharted era: the early twentieth century. To this end, psychiatrists devised a new political rhetoric, ‘early treatment of mental disorder’, in their professional interests and succeeded in enacting the Mental Treatment Act of 1930, which re-instated psychiatrists as masters of English psychiatry. This professional development story began with the Lunacy Act of 1890, which caused a professional crisis in psychiatry and led to inter-professional competition with non-psychiatric medical service providers. In early twentieth-century England, psychiatrists promoted professional development by framing political discourse, conducting a daily trade and promoting new legislation to defend their professional jurisdiction. A profession, he suggests, develops through continuous re-formation of its occupational structure, mode of practice and political language in competing with other professional and non-professional forces. ![]() ![]() Abbott redefines professional development as arising from both abstraction of professional knowledge and competition regarding professional jurisdiction. This paper illustrates the historical dynamics around the professional development of English psychiatry by employing Andrew Abbott’s concept of professional development. In fact, they promoted Lunacy Law reform for a less asylum-dependent mode of psychiatry, with a strong emphasis on professional development. This shift in interest, however, does not indicate that English psychiatrists became passive and unimportant actors in the last century. This is also seen in the studies of twentieth-century psychiatry where historians have debated the rise of psychology, eugenics and community care. In recent decades, historians of English psychiatry have shifted their major concerns away from asylums and psychiatrists in the nineteenth century.
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