Dangerous Motherhood Insanity and Childbirth in Victorian Britain [Hardcover]

Dangerous Motherhood is the first study of the close and complex relationship between mental disorder and childbirth. Exploring the relationship between women, their families and their doctors reveals how explanations for the onset of puerperal insanity were drawn from a broad set of moral, social and environmental frameworks, rather than being bound to ideas that women as a whole were likely to be vulnerable to mental illness. The horror of this devastating disorder which upturned the household, turned gentle mothers into disruptive and dangerous mad women, was magnified by it occurring at a time when it was anticipated that women would be most happy in the fulfillment of their role as mothers.List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction The Birth of Puerperal Insanity Boundaries of Expertise and the Location of Puerperal Insanity Disordered Households: Puerperal Insanity and the Bourgeois Home Thin, Incoherent and Violent: Patients and Puerperal Insanity in the Royal Edinburgh Asylum Women, Doctors and Mental Disorder: Explaining Puerperal Insanity in the Nineteenth Century Dangerous Mothers: Puerperal Insanity and Infanticide From Redemption to the Dark Age: The Decline of Puerperal Insanity Appendix: Dr John Batty Tuke: Tables Illustrative of Puerperal Insanity in the Royal Edinburgh Asylum Bibliography Index

'Dangerous Motherhood is a tour de force of scholarship, which exploits a wide range of little-tapped sources to bring the poignant case histories of manic and depressed women to life. Marland fastidiously delineates the ambivalent attempts of Victorian obstetricians, asylum doctors, and general practitioners, as well as of families and husbands, to understand, classify and respond to the often bizarre and disturbing behaviour of these women. In doing so, she charts the veritable creation of a new female malady - 'puerperal insanity' - a 'dangerous' (if normally transient) affliction that not only transgressed the norms and expectations surroundinglÃM