1 research outputs found
Religion and insanity in America from colonial times to 1900
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Department of History, 2013.This dissertation is a historical study of "religious insanity," a concept that was
common in both popular and medical opinion in England and America from the
seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Religious insanity was based on the
assumption that certain religious beliefs and practices, when carried to emotional
extremes, could produce attacks of insanity in individuals who were already predisposed
to mental illness by temperament, heredity, or childhood upbringing. The concept
endured for more than two hundred years, in part because it was associated with the
political and sectarian conflicts in England during the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, and in part because certain tenets of Christian theology formed the theoretical
foundation of psychological medicine for much of the nineteenth century. In Great
Britain the Anglican establishment used the concept as a polemical tactic to discredit and
repress religious nonconformity. In America it was used by opponents of experiential
religion to discredit the revivals of the First and Second Great Awakening and other
unconventional religious movements such as Millerism and spiritualism. The concept of
religious insanity fell into disuse in the latter half of the nineteenth century because of
liberalizing trends in Protestant theology, changes in the purpose and conduct of religious
revivals, and the secularization of psychological medicine.
This study makes extensive use of the annual reports of nineteenth-century
American asylums and the patient medical records of asylums in New York, Massachusetts, and South Carolina, in order to examine the perspectives of asylum
physicians and of patients whose insanity was attributed to religious causes. It also
examines the role of chaplains in asylums, the use of religious worship as an element of
therapy, and the extent to which asylum physicians provided religious counseling to
patients. Finally, it presents statistical tables derived from asylum reports in order to
examine patterns in religious insanity admissions throughout the nineteenth century