Staff Profiles | School of History, Classics and Archaeology

Dr Jonathan Andrews

Reader in the History of Psychiatry

Email: jonathan.andrews@ncl.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0) 191 208 5756
Personal Website: http://historical-studies.ncl.ac.uk/staff/profile/jonathan.andrews
Address: Dr Jonathan Andrews,
Lecturer, School of Historical Studies,
Armstrong Building, Room 2.28
University of Newcastle upon Tyne,
Newcastle,
NE1 7RU

Introduction

Jonathan Andrews is a Reader in the History of Psychiatry, specialising in the History of Medicine and Psychiatry,in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology, at Newcastle University. His research interests reside primarily in the history of mental illness, learning disabilities and the history of psychiatry, in Britain, from roughly 1600-1914. He has published 3 monographs in the field, most recently (with Andy Scull) Undertaker of the Mind (University of California Press, 2001) and Customers and Patrons of the Mad Trade (University of California Press, 2003), and previous to this (with Roy Porter et al.) The History of Bethlem (Routledge, 1997). Since 2012 he has been working on a 3 year Leverhulme funded research project on 'Fashionable Diseases: Medicine, Literature and Culture, ca. 1660-1832' http://fashionablediseases.info.

Background

I came to Newcastle University on 1 Sept. 2006, on a 0.5 fractional appointment, as a Lecturer in the History of Medicine, having previously been a Senior Lecturer in History/the History of Medicine at Oxford Brookes University, from 1996-2005. Prior to that, during 1991-5, I was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Glasgow Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine.

My research interests reside primarily in the history of mental and nervous illnesses, learning disabilities and the history of psychiatry, in Britain, from roughly 1600-1914. I have been researching and publishing on the history of madness and psychiatry in both early modern and modern Britain since 1988. However, I may be best known for the work I have done more specifically on Bethlem (or ‘Bedlam’) Hospital. This has led some in the past to award me the soubriquet ‘Bedlam Andrews’, but more respectably culminated in a whole series of articles, chapters and a rather monumental revisionist research monograph with Routledge. Over 200,000 words in length, this monograph - straightforwardly entitled The History of Bethlem - was universally acknowledged as a definitive history of that notorious institution, from 1247-1997. Although jointly authored with Roy Porter and others, its 60,000 word early modern section was essentially a revised and truncated version of my 1991 doctoral thesis (supervised by Porter). This book and other associated publications argued convincingly for a reassessment of the hospital’s historical record, and a much more nuanced and less sensationalised account. It was thus less reliant on popular literary stereotypes, and more thoroughly contextualised in wide range of available documentary evidence. My doctoral and post-doctoral research on Bethlem, continues to bear fruit in published form, as should be clear from my forthcoming article in the journal History of Psychiatry on ‘the (und)dress of the mad poor’

Since the late 1980s, my research has ranged widely over the territory of madness and mental disability in early modern Britain. It has included substantial published contributions on the identification and separate provision for incurable or chronic lunatics; on the socio-cultural and legal history of idiocy and mental disability; and on parochial relief and provision, and familial and locally based solutions, for the problems posed by the mentally disordered. It has also included a number of published analyses of individual cases and mad-doctors.

Between 1991 and 1995, I successfully completed a 5-year post-doctorate on Glasgow Royal Asylum and Scottish psychiatry, which saw my research move, both chronologically and geographically, to focus on Scottish psychiatry in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The latter involved me in important and long sustained collaborations with a number of clinical psychiatrists. It bore substantial fruit in a jointly edited history of Glasgow asylum, a booklet on the work of the Scottish Lunacy Commissioners and the central and local oversight of nineteenth-century lunacy in Scotland, and several articles in peer reviewed journals and chapters in edited collections. The latter embraced a wide range of themes and approaches, including prosopographical studies of the career profiles and ideological standpoints of the Glasgow ‘school of psychiatry’; a social analysis of the class-composition of patient admissions to the asylum, and a survey of the changing nature, meanings and contemporary usage of case notes and case histories by asylum and psychiatric specialists. My research on Scottish psychiatry has continued to see published outputs during my Lectureship at Brookes, including an analysis of R.D. Laing’s career and therapeutic experimentation in Glasgow.

My research on early modern madness has led me to closely examine the 18th-century private mad-trade, and the careers and practices of mad-doctors themselves. This culminated in a highly fruitful collaboration with Prof. Andrew Scull, and the publication of two research monographs, Undertaker of the Mind (2001) and Customers and Patrons of the Mad Trade (2003). While one was a broad study of the medical practice and patients of John Monro within the wider framework of English lunacy, the other was a commentary on and edition of Monro’s 1766 casebook. Both books have won wide acclaim in numerous reviews in international historical journals, as well as in the broadsheet press.

I have a long list of published outputs in peer-refereed journals, including Soc. Hist. Medicine, History of Psychiatry, History of Science, Eighteenth-Century Life and J. of the Royal Society, as well as numerous chapters in a variety of edited collections. I have also shown a strong commitment to dissemination and outreach in pursuing and publishing my research, which for example involved me working as a consultant on a major public exhibition of the history of Scottish insanity at the Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow. I have also made a number of media and television appearances, including a recent appearance on In Our Time (March 2016). I have published 12 entries for the New DNB, and contributed to some compendiums and textbooks of medical history, including a chapter in the (2004) Open University coursebook Medicine Transformed; Health, Disease and Society in Europe, 1800-1939.

I have published four edited collections, most recently, with Lesley Topp and James Moran, Madness, Architecture and the Built Environment (Routledge, 2007), and with Anne Digby Sex and Seclusion, Class and Custody (Rodopi, 2004). I have also been working on the History of Broadmoor, focusing on infanticide, arsonists and sex offenders, and a further research project on death, religion and lunacy in Britain, has recently seen the publication of Andrews (ed.) Lunacy's Last Rites: Dying Insane in Britain, c. 1729-1939, a special issue of the journal History of Psychiatry (2012).

My interest in fashionable diseases is primarily in patients' perspectives on such diseases, and how these perspectives were mediated by medical ideas and praxis, the medical market and by wider literary and socio-cultural discourses. I am especially interested in widening existing scholarship in this area, to focus on less explored diseases such as bilious and dyspepsic disorders, liver complaints, headache, gout and rheumatism, and to contrast the experience and definition of such disorders with démodé complaints such as smallpox, rickets and cholera. I am also concerned to explore the extent to which modish maladies were experienced, emulated and adapted, or vice versa contested further down the social scales, by the emergent (if difficult to define) 'middling sort' and nouveau riches of the Georgian era. Work broadly linked to this area, has included an article case study of on vapours ('Mrs Clerke's case', History of Psychiatry (1990) and chapter on travel and mental afflictions in Richard Wrigley and George Revill (eds) Pathologies of Travel (Rodopi, 2000).

Work on fashionable diseases,has led inter alia to a special edition of the journal Literature and Medicine Fall, 2017: Jonathan Andrews and Clark Lawlor (eds), ‘ "An exclusive privilege…to complain": Framing Fashionable Diseases from the Georgian to the Modern Era'.

A recent collaboration with Chris Philo on Scottish psychiatry, ihas led to a special edition of History of Psychiatry, 'The History and Geography of Scottish Psychiatry', published n in 2017

Area of Expertise

History of psychiatry and history of medicine; history of insanity/mental illness and learning disabilities in Britain ca. 1600-1914; asylum history; crime and psychiatry; history of diseases, ca. 1700-1900; fashion and disease in the Georgian era; the sufferer experience of illness and patient narratives; the poor law and medicine.

Qualifications

ACADEMIC QUALIFICATIONS
Oct. 1981-June 1984
WESTFIELD COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
BA (Hons) History, IIi

Oct. 1985-March 1991 PhD History: thesis entitled
`Bedlam Revisited: A History of Bethlem Hospital, c1634-c1770'
PhD Supervisor: Dr. Roy Porter (Wellcome Institute for the
History of Medicine); PhD Examiners: Professor William
Parry-Jones (Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Royal
Hospital for Sick Children, Yorkhill, Glasgow) and Michael
Hunter (Department of History, Birkbeck College, University of
London)

Previous Positions

Senior Lecturer in History/History of Medicine, School of Arts and Humanities, Oxford Brookes Univerisy, 1996-2006
Wellcome University Award Holder, Centre for the History of Medicine, Oxford Brookes University, 1996-2001
Wellcome Post-doctoral Research Fellow, Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, 1991-2005

Memberships

Member: Society for the Social History of Medicine
Member: Scottish Society for the History of Medicine
Member: Editorial Board, Journal of Forenisc Psychiatry
Member: Editorial Board, History of Psychiatry
Member: Network for the History of Hospitals
Member; Network for the History of Medicinal Receipts

Honours and Awards

GRANTS, SCHOLARSHIPS, AWARDS & PRIZES (1982-96)

1982-3 & WESTFIELD COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
1983-4 Undergraduate Studentships
(awarded for highest quality of course work)

1983-4 Undergraduate Skeel Essay Prize
('The non-decorative meanings of the Bayeux Tapestry
margins')

1987-88 & Postgraduate Research Studentship
1988-9 (relinquished)

1988-90 THE BRITISH ACADEMY
Major State Studentship (for Postgraduate Research)

1990-91 INSTITUTE OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
Scouloudi History Research Fellowship (ca. £6,000)

Languages

French, some Latin and Danish

Recent Research

Apart from my research on fashionable diseases, my most recent research has been in the following 3 main areas:

1) The history of Broadmoor Hospital, Crowthorne (England) ca. 1863-1913, and of Perth Criminal Lunatic Sept. (Scotland), ca. 1853-1913, focusing on sex offenders, arsonists, non-capital offenders and infanticide case sin particular.

Outputs from this project include:

Andrews J. The boundaries of Her Majesty's Pleasure: discharging child-murderers from Broadmoor and Perth Criminal Lunatic Department, c.1860-1920. In: Jackson, M, ed. Infanticide: Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550-2000. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002, pp.216-248.

Jonathan Andrews, 'From stack-firing to pyromania: medico-legal concepts of insane arson in British, US and European contexts, c. 1800-1913. Part I', History of Psychiatry, 2010 Sep; 21 (83 Pt 3):243-60.

Jonathan Andrews, 'From stack-firing to pyromania: medico-legal concepts of insane arson in British, US and European contexts, c. 1800-1913. Part 2', History of Psychiatry, 2010 Dec; 21 (84 Pt 4):387-405.

2) The relationship between mortality and insanity, ca. 1750-1913, focusing on pathology, post-mortem dissection, burial, funerals/memorialisation, the mediation of death by the family/clergy and wider community.

Outputs from this research include:

Jonathan Andrews (ed.) Lunacy’s Last Rites: Dying Insane in Britain, c. 1729-1939. Special issue of History of Psychiatry, forthcoming March 2012, with an introduction and article by me entitled ‘Death and the dead-house in Victorian asylums: necroscopy versus mourning at the Royal Edinburgh Asylum, c. 1832–1901’, and an extract from JC Prichard’s Treatise on Insanity (1835) edited with an introduction by me.

3) The relationship between insanity and religion, ca. 1700-1900, especially religious enthusiasm, the role of asylum chaplains, and religious delusions.

Outputs include:

Jonathan Andrews, 'Cause or symptom? Medical contentions surrounding religious melancholy in late Georgian Britain', in Richard Terry (ed.) 'Depression in the Enlightenment', Studies in the Literary Imagination (special issue), forthcoming 2012

Publications

Andrews J, Kennaway J. Experiencing, Exploiting and Evacuating Bile: Framing Fashionable Biliousness from the Sufferer’s Perspective. Literature and Medicine 2017, 35(2), 292-333.
Andrews J, Philo C. Histories of Asylums, Insanity and Psychiatry in Scotland. History of Psychiatry 2017, 28(1), 3-14.
Andrews J, Lawlor C, Kennaway J. Introduction "An Exclusive Privilege…to Complain": Framing Fashionable Diseases in the Long Eighteenth Century; Experiencing, Exploiting, and Evacuating Bile: Framing Fashionable Biliousness from the Sufferer's Perspective. Literature and Medicine 2017, 35(2), 239-269.
Philo C, Andrews J. Introduction: Histories of asylums, insanity and psychiatry in Scotland. History of Psychiatry 2017, 28(1), 1-12.
Andrews J, Philo C. James Frame's The Philosophy of Insanity (1860). History of Psychiatry 2017, 28(1), 129-141.
Kennaway J, Andrews J. 'The Grand Organ of Sympathy': 'Fashionable' Stomach Complaints and the Mind in Britain, 1700-1850. Social History of Medicine 2019, 32(1), 57-79.
Andrews J. ‘Revolutions in the Head’, Book Review of Andrew Scull, Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity (Thames & Hudson, 2015). BBC History Magazine 2015, 71-72.
Andrews J. Book Review of Heather R. Beatty, Nervous Disease in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain: The Reality of a Fashionable Disorder (Studies for the Society for the Social History of Medicine, 6.) ( London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012). Isis 2015, 106(3), 723-724.
Andrews J. Death and the dead-house in Victorian asylums: necroscopy versus mourning at the Royal Edinburgh Asylum, c. 1832-1901. History of Psychiatry 2012, 23(1), 6-26.
Andrews J. Introduction: Lunacy's last rites. History of Psychiatry 2012, 23(1), 3-5.
Andrews J, ed. Lunacy’s Last Rites: Dying Insane in Britain, c. 1629-1939. London: Sage Publications Ltd, 2012.
Andrews J. 'Of the Termination of Insanity in Death', by James Cowles Prichard (1835). History of Psychiatry 2012, 23(1), 129-136.
Andrews J. Cause or Symptom?: Contentions Surrounding Religious Melancholy and Mental Medicine in Late-Georgian Britain. Studies in the Literary Imagination 2011, 44(2), 63-91.
Andrews J. History of medicine: health, medicine and disease in the eighteenth century. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 2011, 34(4), 503-516.
Andrews J. From stack-firing to pyromania: medico-legal concepts of insane arson in British, US and European contexts, c. 1800-1913. Part 1. History of Psychiatry 2010, 21(3), 243-260.
Andrews J. From stack-firing to pyromania: medico-legal concepts of insane arson in British, US and European contexts, c. 1800-1913. Part 2. History of Psychiatry 2010, 21(4), 387-405.
Andrews J. Lunatic Hospitals in Georgian England, 1750-1830. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 2009, 83(4), 791-793.
Topp L, Moran J, Andrews J. Madness, Architecture and the Built Environment: Psychiatric Spaces in Historical Context. London: Routledge, 2007.
Andrews J. The (un)dress of the mad poor in England, c.1650-1850. Part 1. History of Psychiatry 2007, 18(1), 5-24.
Andrews J. The (un)dress of the mad poor in England, c.1650-1850. Part 2. History of Psychiatry 2007, 18(2), 131-156.
Andrews J. Introduction: Gender and Class in the Historiography of British Psychiatry. In: Jonathan Andrews and Anne Digby, ed. Sex and Seclusion, Class and Custody: Perspectives on Gender and Class in the History of Psychiatry. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004, pp.7-44.
Andrews J, Digby A. Sex and Seclusion, Class and Custody: Perspectives on Gender and Class in the History of British and Irish Psychiatry. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi BV, 2004.
Andrews J. The Rise of the Asylum in Britain. In: Deborah Brunton, ed. Medicine Transformed; Health, Disease and Society in Europe, 1800-1939. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004, pp.298-330.
Andrews J, Scull A. Customers and Patrons of the Mad-Trade: The Management of Lunacy in Eighteenth-Century London: With the Complete Text of John Monro's 1766 Case Book. Berkeley, Los Angeles, USA: University of California Press, 2003.
Andrews J. Grand Master of Bedlam: Roy Porter and the History of Psychiatry. History of Science 2003, 41(Part 3, No. 133), 269-286.
Andrews J. The boundaries of Her Majesty's Pleasure: discharging child-murderers from Broadmoor and Perth Criminal Lunatic Department, c.1860-1920. In: Jackson, M, ed. Infanticide : Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550-2000. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002, pp.216-248.
Andrews J, Scull A. Undertaker of the Mind: John Monro and Mad-Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001.
Andrews J. Letting madness range: travel and madness, c1700-1900'. In: Wrigley, R;Revill, G, ed. Pathologies of Travel. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000, pp.25-88.
Andrews J. Raising the tone of asylumdom. Maintaining and expelling pauper lunatics at the Glasgow Royal Asylum in the nineteenth century. In: Melling, J., Forsythe, B, ed. Insanity, Institutions and Society: A Social History of Madness in Comparative Perspective. London; New York: Routledge, 1999, pp.200-222.
Jonathan Andrews. “They’re in the trade of Lunacy ... They “cannot interfere” - they say’: The Scottish Lunacy Commissioners and Lunacy Reform in Nineteenth-century Scotland. London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 1998.
Jonathan Andrews. Begging the question of idiocy: the definition and socio-cultural meaning of idiocy in early modern Britain. History of Psychiatry 1998, 9(33 & 34).
Andrews J. Begging the question of idiocy: the definition and socio-cultural meaning of idiocy in early modern Britain, Part 2. History of Psychiatry 1998, 9(34), 179-200.
Jonathan Andrews. Case notes, case histories and the patient’s experience of insanity at Gartnavel Royal Asylum, Glasgow, in the nineteenth century. Social History of Medicine 1998, 11(2), 255-81.
Jonathan Andrews, Helen Bartlett and John Stewart, ed. Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Health, Illness and Health Care Provision in Britain since the Seventeenth Century: Discussion Papers. Oxford: Oxford Brookes University, 1998.
Jonathan Andrews. 'Notions of prevention and mental health in Britain, c1700-1900' and 'Introduction'. In: Jonathan Andrews, Helen Bartlett and John Stewart, ed. Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Health, Illness and Health Care Provision in Britain since the Seventeenth Century: Discussion Papers. 1998, pp.14-35, 7-13.
Jonathan Andrews. R.D. Laing in Scotland - Facts and fictions of the “rumpus room” and interpersonal psychiatry. In: M. Gijswijt-Hofstra and R. Porter, ed. Cultures of Psychiatry and Mental Health in Postwar Britain and the Netherlands. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998, pp.121-50.
Andrews J. A failure to florish? David Yellowlees and the Glasgow School of Psychiatry: Part 1. History of Psychiatry 1997, 8(30), 177-212.
Andrews J. A failure to flourish?: David Yellowlees and the Glasgow School of Psychiarty: Part 2. History of Psychiatry 1997, 8(31), 333-360.
Jonathan Andrews, Asa Briggs, Roy Porter, Peny Tucker and Keir Waddington. A History of Bethlem Hospital, 1247-97. London; New York: Routldge, 1997.
Jonathan Andrews. Maurice R. Raynaud and his protean disease. Journal of Medical Biography 1997, 5, 46-50.
Jonathan Andrews and Iain Smith. David Yellowlees and the Glasgow School of Psychiatry. In: G. E. Berrios and H. Freeman, ed. 150 Years of Psychiatry. Volume II: The Aftermath. London: The Athlone Press, 1996, pp.309-38.
Jonathan Andrews. Identifying and providing for the mentally disabled in early modern London. In: david wright and Anne Digby, ed. Historical Perspectives on People with Learning Difficulties. London; New York: Routledge, 1996, pp.65-92.
Jonathan Andrews. The politics of committal to Bethlem. In: Roy Porter, ed. Medicine and the Enlightenment. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995, pp.6-63.
Jonathan Andrews and Iain Smith, ed. "Let there be light again": A History of Gartnavel Royal Hospital from its beginnings to the present day. Glasgow: Gartnavel Royal Hospital, 1993.
Jonathan Andrews. "Hardly a hospital, but a charity for pauper lunatics"? Therapeutics at Bethlem in the seventeenth & eighteenth centuries. In: Jonathan Barry & Colin Jones, ed. Medicine & Charity Before the Welfare State. London; New York: Routledge, 1991, pp.63-82.
Andrews J. Bedlam revisited: A history of Bethlem Hospital, ca. 1634-1770. 1991. Available at: https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/bitstream/handle/123456789/1365/ANDREWSBedlamRevisited1991.pdf?sequence=1.
Jonathan Andrews. "In her Vapours...[or] indeed in her Madness"? Mrs Clerke's case: an early eighteenth century psychiatric controversy. History of Psychiatry 1990, 1(1), 125-44.
Jonathan Andrews. A respectable mad-doctor? Dr Richard Hale, F. R. S. (1670-1728). Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 1990, 44, 169-203.
Jonathan Andrews. The Social History of Medicine in the 1990s. Social History of Medicine 1990, 3(3), 515-18.
Jonathan Andrews. The Lot of the "incurably" insane in enlightenment England. Eighteenth Century Life 1988, 12(1), 1-18.