This book examines an influential psychiatric classification that has been overlooked by historians of psychiatry: the Table of the Forms of Mental Disorder, a standard set of psychopathologies that were used from 1845 until 1948 to diagnose admissions to British psychiatric hospitals. In so doing it demonstrates how the role of early psychiatric epidemiology in the form of asylums statistics has been overlooked when writing the history of psychiatric classification. The author discusses the standard classification of the insanities that was used in official records and developed by British medical societies, and which caused much debate and division amongst Victorian, Edwardian and interwar psychiatrists. Asylum statistics functioned to communicate knowledge beyond medical circles, and were frequently invoked by social commentaries on the rise of insanity, fears of degeneration, population and race science, and the links between gender and mental disorder. Linking the history of public health administration and population research to the development of standard concepts of mental disorder, this book provides a lasting contribution to the social history of medicine and assesses the ways in which social and cultural factors shaped the development of data collection procedures and technologies in medical research and mental health services.weiterlesen