1. Hilary Marland, ‘Disappointment and Desolation: Women, Doctors and Interpretations of Puerperal Insanity in the Nineteenth Century’, History of Psychiatry, 14:3 (2003), p. 307. See also Marland, Dangerous Motherhood.
2. Levine-Clark, ‘Dysfunctional Domesticity’, pp. 348; 347. Patricia Prestwich also hints at ‘emotional’ families in her comments that claims of violence may have been exaggerated by family members who had an ‘emotional need to justify their actions’, or the committal of relatives; see Prestwich, ‘Family strategies and medical power: ‘voluntary’ committal in a Parisian asylum, 1876–1914’, in The Confinement of the Insane, p. 91. See also Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly, Disordered Lives: Eighteenth-Century Families and Their Unruly Relatives (Cambridge UK, Oxford UK and Cambridge Mass.: Polity Press, 1996). p. 7.
3. MacKenzie, Psychiatry for the Rich, p. 97; Penny Russell, ‘A Wish of Distinction’: Colonial Gentility and Femininity (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1994), p. 127.
4. Peter Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, ‘Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards’, American Historical Review 90 (2001), p. 814.
5. See also Jan Lewis and Peter Stearns (eds), An Emotional History of the United States (New York and London: New York University Press, 1998). In framing his approach to the history of emotions, Stearns has emphasised the importance of the discursive context for emotions in any period; the need to examine changing emotional expressions over time; and the tensions inherent in an examination of the mediation between emotional standards and peoples’ experiences. The social history of medicine and health is no exception. Stearns mentions the history of health as one field that might benefit from such an inquiry, p. 832. Together with Stearns, historians have attempted to classify ‘emotives’ using specific archives, such as William Reddy’s exploration of French judicial archives of the 1820s. Barbara Rosenwein has explored ‘emotional communities’ and her work offers useful observations for this interpretation of the asylum as one site for the expression of emotion;