Books by Kathleen M Brian
Phallacies: Historical Intersections of Disability and Masculinity is a collection of essays that... more Phallacies: Historical Intersections of Disability and Masculinity is a collection of essays that focuses on disabled men who negotiate their masculinity as well as their disability. The chapters cover a broad range of topics: institutional structures that define what it means to be a man with a disability; the place of women in situations where masculinity and disability are constructed; men with physical and war-related disabilities; male hysteria, suicide clubs, and mercy killing; male disability in literature and popular culture; and more. All the authors regard masculinity and disability in the historical contexts of the Americas and Western Europe, with particular attention to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Taken together, the essays in this volume offer a nuanced portrait of the complex, and at times competing, interactions between masculinity and disability.
Articles & Chapters by Kathleen M Brian
By accounting for the law’s productive capacity to structure asylum physicians’ encounters with s... more By accounting for the law’s productive capacity to structure asylum physicians’ encounters with suicide, this essay argues that the antebellum asylum was a technology for the preservation of life. The essay first shows how suicide’s history as a crime encouraged popular attributions of suicide to insanity. What began as a tactic to protect survivors, however, ended by bolstering the professional claims of asylum medicine. Initially it appeared there was much to gain from claiming suicide as their own, but dominion over prevention in fact rendered asylum physicians and their staffs vulnerable in unanticipated ways: for while agents of suicide were effectively evacuated of legal responsibility, a variety of laws made physicians more accountable than ever. Focusing on medical superintendent Amariah Brigham and his staff at the New York State Lunatic Asylum shows how the anxiety of assuming guardianship over the suicidal created networks of accountability that profoundly affected daily life.
The article argues that Anna Agnew's popular 1886 autobiography worked to increase public recepti... more The article argues that Anna Agnew's popular 1886 autobiography worked to increase public receptivity to ideas of selective death by co-opting the discursive strategies of hereditarianism to explain her attempts at both filicide and suicide. Prevailing eugenics rationale insisted that insane individuals, like other "defectives," should either be cured or eliminated. In this threatening context, Anna evaded responsibility for her violence by emphasizing her victimization, miraculous cure, and responsible acts of citizenship. In its discursive reliance on psychiatry, evolution, and eugenics, Anna's popular narrative—as well as her attempt to eliminate her children—contributed to the interarticulation of progressive humanitarianism and selective murder. In contemporary disability studies discourse, scholars and activists alike often suggest as solution the inclusion of persons with disabilities in debates over medical and scientific policy. While such a perspective is necessary, Anna's narrative demonstrates that persons with disabilities do not stand beyond and outside of available discourse. The rhetorical tactics used to convey the perspective of members of the disability community deserve to be investigated with the same tenacity and critical eye as the rhetorical tactics used to convey those perspectives less often aligned with the disability studies project.
This essay argues that historians will gain a deeper understanding of the nosological ritual and ... more This essay argues that historians will gain a deeper understanding of the nosological ritual and the professionals who enacted it by placing internal developments of late nineteenth-century psychiatry alongside the synchronic rise of the linguistic sciences. Doing so demonstrates that, contrary to historical consensus, what fell out of favour were traditional methods of observation rather than the practice of classification itself.
Through an analysis of the aural culture at St Elizabeths Hospital (Washington, DC) between 1877 and 1911 as evidenced by patient case files and diagnostic training manuals, I focus on shifting methods of psychiatric audition as primary sites of professional claims to legitimacy at a time when the specialty was under attack from critics both external and internal.
Blogs by Kathleen M Brian
Any conversation about health care must begin with the collective acknowledgement of a simple fac... more Any conversation about health care must begin with the collective acknowledgement of a simple fact: the selective incorporation of humans based on statistical predictions of vitality is the foundation upon which insurance companies assembled themselves.
Talks by Kathleen M Brian
2021 Lapidus Center Conference: "Pandemic Legacies: Health, Healing, and Medicine in the Age of Slavery and Beyond", 2021
Conference Presentations by Kathleen M Brian
A strange and distressing “epidemic” swept through the New York State Lunatic Asylum at Utica dur... more A strange and distressing “epidemic” swept through the New York State Lunatic Asylum at Utica during the summer of 1850: from the middle of July to the first of August, more than two dozen residents were relentlessly resolved on suicide. They tore open their own throats, swallowed lethal quantities of opium, and fashioned nooses from clothing and bedding found on the ward. Attendants slept little that month. They spent their nights alongside suicidal patients, made liberal use of mechanical restraints, and forced smiles despite “heavy heart[s].” The looming potentiality of suicide was a prevailing anxiety that touched not only an asylum’s superintendent, medical officers, and ward attendants, but also its cooks, carriage drivers, and machinists. It was, quite simply, “a burden which they alone know who bear it.”
Taking superintendent Amariah Brigham and his staff at Utica as its case study, this paper argues that the omnipresence of this burden demands that we consider the asylum as something much more than an institution for treating the insane: it was also a technology for the preservation of life. While historians of medicine have spent more than a half-century interpreting the asylum, the place of suicide prevention remains remarkably underdeveloped. Reconsidering the asylum in this way, however, allows us to account for the complex coexistence of those “two great paradigms of power”: discipline and law. For as ward notes, correspondence, and the superintendent’s annual reports reveal, suicide mattered. This was particularly true for the staff at state institutions, who found themselves legally compelled to admit the suicidal. It influenced therapeutics and determined architectural style. It informed every moment of every day and every night. At the same time that it structured an institution’s social and physical environments, it also disciplined all individuals who, at one time or another, inhabited them. Assuming legal guardianship over legally irresponsible—but nevertheless agentive—suicidal patients thus created networks of accountability that profoundly impacted daily life.
In an 1848 memorial to Congress, Dorothea Dix urged the appropriation of government funds toward ... more In an 1848 memorial to Congress, Dorothea Dix urged the appropriation of government funds toward establishing a comprehensive national system of insane asylums. She made her case by regaling congressional leaders with tales of the “pauper insane” confined to cellars and smokehouses with shackles or iron rings placed about the neck. Most disturbing of all was the practice, common in several New England towns, of selling the insane at auction.
By emphasizing vulnerability to physical captivity and public sale, Dix played upon sentimental tropes already well established in abolitionist literature. Yet even as she did so, she also assured congressional leaders that neither African Americans nor Native Americans experienced rates of insanity high enough that they would have need of an asylum. Though Dix’s broad-ranging proposal was ultimately rejected in favor of establishing a single federal institution on the outskirts of Washington, between 1848 and 1854, the National Government stood poised to become the single largest asylum benefactor in the nation. By placing debates over the government’s responsibility toward the insane alongside debates about slavery, I suggest that race relations are crucial for understanding the uneven and equivocal development of federal policies toward persons with mental disabilities.
During the final two decades of the nineteenth century, dozens of “suicide clubs” purportedly ope... more During the final two decades of the nineteenth century, dozens of “suicide clubs” purportedly operated in myriad locations across the United. Paying particular attention to Chicago in the wake of the Haymarket Affair (1886), this paper argues that suicide clubs were a cultural narrative intended to neutralize radical attachments within the labor movement. In extravagant exposés that underscored participants’ German and Bohemian nativities, anti-labor editors and journalists brought to light the esoteric and subversive dealings of these astonishing societies. These narratives drew on a novel mixture of disability and anarchy to recast the gathering of émigré workers as esoteric organizations formed in the interest of death.
This paper argues that the ancestral body of suicides as a tool of insurance underwriters emerged... more This paper argues that the ancestral body of suicides as a tool of insurance underwriters emerged in response to the legal successes of beneficiaries, who increasingly pathologized suicide in their pursuit of policy payouts. To make this argument, I analyze the suicide clause in life insurance policies as it circulated within industry journals, company advertisements, and federal court cases. Meant to exclude claims when death occurred as a result of “one’s own hand,” the suicide clause became the nexus of heated legal debates during the 1860s and 1870s.
These debates focused on property forfeiture, familial responsibility, and the potential criminality of self-destruction, but were embedded in a hereditarian discourse that also allowed insurance companies to perfect their technologies of metasomatization, such as the family history. While Foucault developed his concept of metasomatization most powerfully through an analysis of psychiatric discourse and praxis, the suicide contests demonstrate that this phenomenon was very much at play in federal courtrooms. In their legal arguments for federal protection, insurance companies juxtaposed the diseased ancestral body of suicides against two additional ancestral bodies of their own creation. The first of these was the ancestral body of healthy, industrious American policyholders; the second, the ancestral body of the insurance corporation itself. Through this juxtaposition, insurance companies ultimately succeeded in laying claim to federal protection. The suicide contests thus illuminate new ways in which categories of (dis)ability and (ill)health solidified at the intersection of finance capitalism and the federal state.
On a February morning of 1862, Republican Senator Charles Sumner (MA) accused the South of suicid... more On a February morning of 1862, Republican Senator Charles Sumner (MA) accused the South of suicide “wickedly undertaken.” In a series of congressional resolutions that would become known as the State Suicide Theory, Sumner equated secession with a violent act of felo de se committed by the southern body politic. Its implications for the racial order were extreme: if enacted, it promised both the dissolution of slavery and the universal disenfranchisement of white southerners. While Reconstruction historians dismiss Sumner’s theory as too radical to have been influential, the theory’s popular circulation suggests its widespread import for legitimizing the northern war effort. Indeed, this paper argues that drawing on the language of emancipation as punishment for criminal suicide allowed northern abolitionists to transform the emancipatory project from a dubious act of federal aggression to a necessary war measure authorized by the Union public. Through an analysis of correspondence, political pamphlets, and newspaper coverage of mass meetings, this paper explores the centrality of suicide to the politics of emancipation and illuminates key intersections between sovereignty, medico-legal discourse, and national belonging.
This paper analyzes the maps, blueprints, and ward notes of St. Elizabeths Hospital (District of ... more This paper analyzes the maps, blueprints, and ward notes of St. Elizabeths Hospital (District of Columbia) to argue that racial identity and identification is a crucial lens for understanding mid-nineteenth-century therapeutics of the asylum. Building on Charles Rosenberg’s call to focus on the amalgamation of theory and practice (what he calls “therapeutics”), this paper interrogates the intersection of African-American identity, asylum architecture, and professional knowledge to allow for a more nuanced understanding of how asylum physicians and their black patients understood and experienced one another.
This paper will explore the convergence of racial designation and representations of suicide in U... more This paper will explore the convergence of racial designation and representations of suicide in U.S. antebellum popular print culture. Through an analysis of roughly 2,500 death notices published in 125 newspapers across the nation, I contend that the designation of mental disability operated as a mode of redemption that the dominant public reserved for a privileged category of the dead. This category was thus populated by those deemed white through specific interarticulations of nativity, gender, temperance, and laboring potential. This held particular significance in a historical moment in which the insane asylum acted as the principle method of suicide prevention. Thus this paper also repositions the insane asylum as a location not only of problematic confinement, but as one of death-defying surveillance reserved for those deemed “worthy of life.” Inspired by scholars Chris Bell, Jennifer Barager, and others invested in critiquing the whiteness of disability studies as a field, this paper illuminates nineteenth-century interarticulations of race, mental disability, and self-inflicted death. Unlike Bell and Barager, however, I argue that we must trace disability as it moved across multiple categories of race, rather than simply privileging differences between black and white. This paper also builds on the work of scholars such as Deborah Stone and Emily Martin by emphasizing disability as a site of privilege and demonstrating the ways in which this phenomenon worked well beyond the official realm of state designation and welfare.
Book Reviews by Kathleen M Brian
Social History of Medicine, 2018
The historian's dream scenario—serendipitously stumbling upon a cache of previously unexamined do... more The historian's dream scenario—serendipitously stumbling upon a cache of previously unexamined documents in one's own home—prompted Susan Bartlett Foote's inquiry into a group of postwar reformers who envisioned nothing less than a complete overhaul of Minnesota's mental health system. Although Foote's subjects were ultimately defeated, they nevertheless animated state politics between 1945 and 1954, created powerful grassroots alliances and, for a time, successfully ameliorated institutional conditions. They also, significantly, served as the precursors to later organisations, including the Mental Health Association of Minnesota, which would prove more enduring...
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Books by Kathleen M Brian
Articles & Chapters by Kathleen M Brian
Through an analysis of the aural culture at St Elizabeths Hospital (Washington, DC) between 1877 and 1911 as evidenced by patient case files and diagnostic training manuals, I focus on shifting methods of psychiatric audition as primary sites of professional claims to legitimacy at a time when the specialty was under attack from critics both external and internal.
Blogs by Kathleen M Brian
Talks by Kathleen M Brian
Conference Presentations by Kathleen M Brian
Taking superintendent Amariah Brigham and his staff at Utica as its case study, this paper argues that the omnipresence of this burden demands that we consider the asylum as something much more than an institution for treating the insane: it was also a technology for the preservation of life. While historians of medicine have spent more than a half-century interpreting the asylum, the place of suicide prevention remains remarkably underdeveloped. Reconsidering the asylum in this way, however, allows us to account for the complex coexistence of those “two great paradigms of power”: discipline and law. For as ward notes, correspondence, and the superintendent’s annual reports reveal, suicide mattered. This was particularly true for the staff at state institutions, who found themselves legally compelled to admit the suicidal. It influenced therapeutics and determined architectural style. It informed every moment of every day and every night. At the same time that it structured an institution’s social and physical environments, it also disciplined all individuals who, at one time or another, inhabited them. Assuming legal guardianship over legally irresponsible—but nevertheless agentive—suicidal patients thus created networks of accountability that profoundly impacted daily life.
By emphasizing vulnerability to physical captivity and public sale, Dix played upon sentimental tropes already well established in abolitionist literature. Yet even as she did so, she also assured congressional leaders that neither African Americans nor Native Americans experienced rates of insanity high enough that they would have need of an asylum. Though Dix’s broad-ranging proposal was ultimately rejected in favor of establishing a single federal institution on the outskirts of Washington, between 1848 and 1854, the National Government stood poised to become the single largest asylum benefactor in the nation. By placing debates over the government’s responsibility toward the insane alongside debates about slavery, I suggest that race relations are crucial for understanding the uneven and equivocal development of federal policies toward persons with mental disabilities.
These debates focused on property forfeiture, familial responsibility, and the potential criminality of self-destruction, but were embedded in a hereditarian discourse that also allowed insurance companies to perfect their technologies of metasomatization, such as the family history. While Foucault developed his concept of metasomatization most powerfully through an analysis of psychiatric discourse and praxis, the suicide contests demonstrate that this phenomenon was very much at play in federal courtrooms. In their legal arguments for federal protection, insurance companies juxtaposed the diseased ancestral body of suicides against two additional ancestral bodies of their own creation. The first of these was the ancestral body of healthy, industrious American policyholders; the second, the ancestral body of the insurance corporation itself. Through this juxtaposition, insurance companies ultimately succeeded in laying claim to federal protection. The suicide contests thus illuminate new ways in which categories of (dis)ability and (ill)health solidified at the intersection of finance capitalism and the federal state.
Book Reviews by Kathleen M Brian
Through an analysis of the aural culture at St Elizabeths Hospital (Washington, DC) between 1877 and 1911 as evidenced by patient case files and diagnostic training manuals, I focus on shifting methods of psychiatric audition as primary sites of professional claims to legitimacy at a time when the specialty was under attack from critics both external and internal.
Taking superintendent Amariah Brigham and his staff at Utica as its case study, this paper argues that the omnipresence of this burden demands that we consider the asylum as something much more than an institution for treating the insane: it was also a technology for the preservation of life. While historians of medicine have spent more than a half-century interpreting the asylum, the place of suicide prevention remains remarkably underdeveloped. Reconsidering the asylum in this way, however, allows us to account for the complex coexistence of those “two great paradigms of power”: discipline and law. For as ward notes, correspondence, and the superintendent’s annual reports reveal, suicide mattered. This was particularly true for the staff at state institutions, who found themselves legally compelled to admit the suicidal. It influenced therapeutics and determined architectural style. It informed every moment of every day and every night. At the same time that it structured an institution’s social and physical environments, it also disciplined all individuals who, at one time or another, inhabited them. Assuming legal guardianship over legally irresponsible—but nevertheless agentive—suicidal patients thus created networks of accountability that profoundly impacted daily life.
By emphasizing vulnerability to physical captivity and public sale, Dix played upon sentimental tropes already well established in abolitionist literature. Yet even as she did so, she also assured congressional leaders that neither African Americans nor Native Americans experienced rates of insanity high enough that they would have need of an asylum. Though Dix’s broad-ranging proposal was ultimately rejected in favor of establishing a single federal institution on the outskirts of Washington, between 1848 and 1854, the National Government stood poised to become the single largest asylum benefactor in the nation. By placing debates over the government’s responsibility toward the insane alongside debates about slavery, I suggest that race relations are crucial for understanding the uneven and equivocal development of federal policies toward persons with mental disabilities.
These debates focused on property forfeiture, familial responsibility, and the potential criminality of self-destruction, but were embedded in a hereditarian discourse that also allowed insurance companies to perfect their technologies of metasomatization, such as the family history. While Foucault developed his concept of metasomatization most powerfully through an analysis of psychiatric discourse and praxis, the suicide contests demonstrate that this phenomenon was very much at play in federal courtrooms. In their legal arguments for federal protection, insurance companies juxtaposed the diseased ancestral body of suicides against two additional ancestral bodies of their own creation. The first of these was the ancestral body of healthy, industrious American policyholders; the second, the ancestral body of the insurance corporation itself. Through this juxtaposition, insurance companies ultimately succeeded in laying claim to federal protection. The suicide contests thus illuminate new ways in which categories of (dis)ability and (ill)health solidified at the intersection of finance capitalism and the federal state.