Fluid

Abstract

In this chapter Wallis explores how post-mortem investigation in the late-Victorian asylum informed both treatments during life and new ideas about the basis of mental disease. Wallis shows how trepanation (making a hole in the skull) was employed by asylum doctors as a means of draining excess cerebro-spinal fluid, discussing contemporary rationales for the procedure and ethical concerns. The chapter goes on to consider how other fluids in the body, such as urine, were also analysed by asylum doctors. Finally, as asylum doctors began to evolve a ‘toxic’ theory of mental disease at the end of the nineteenth century, Wallis demonstrates how new bacteriological understandings of mental disease could co-exist with older models that stressed the patient’s family and life history.