Introduction

This chapter uses the surviving admissions and discharge data of both institutions to analyse the characteristics of the patients and explore the treatment outcomes: why men and women found themselves incarcerated, why some never left alive, and the reasons yet others were discharged very soon after admission. These details allow us to consider whether Poor Law institutions such as Brookwood Asylum were representative ‘microcosms of society’, or whether they held only its poorest and most disruptive members. Challenging the stereotypical reputation of the nineteenth-century asylum, there is no evidence here to show that more women were deliberately detained than men. Both Brookwood and Holloway Sanatorium admitted approximately equal numbers of the sexes, which supports those historians who contradict Showalter's The Female Malady. Male and female patients were diagnosed with different illnesses, and the research here indicates that women did tend to stay longer in the asylum than their male counterparts, but the latter could be a matter of choice, especially for middle-class women.

Holloway's, management would have presumed that the vast majority of applicants were intrinsically ‘middle-class’, taking into account not only their financial circumstances but also broader social indicators of status. Lorraine Walsh has suggested that, when considering the asylum patient's, experience, there is the potential to overlook the importance of other factors beyond class concerns, such as contemporary interpretations of respectability and socially acceptable behaviour, which were the cornerstones of moral therapy.