Full Citation
Title: Found insane in ‘the Holy Land’: Psychiatry and the African American experience in Illinois, 1870–1910
Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis
Publication Year: 2007
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Abstract: This work presents the encounter between African Americans struggling northward and the expanding state sponsored psychiatric system in Illinois. In the spirit of recent scholarship in disability history, it treats people who experienced disability as its subject, specifically individuals who belonged to two minority groups, one racial and the other disabled. Yielding insights that shed new light on American history generally, a disability studies approach here fills two particular voids by illuminating the experience of African Americans in psychiatric care and the history of medicine from the patients' perspective. In addition to exploring many unique facets of individual experience in the community and in the hospital, this dissertation examines how race became a criterion for distinguishing pathology from criminality, as well as determining the type and quality of mental health treatment. Following emancipation, African Americans began moving out—first to southern cities and then, by the early 20th century, to cities in the North. In their travels, they sought social and economic freedom, as well as an escape from physical violence. Many found a near equivalent to the promised land, while others found themselves segregated with a number of their peers in the ward of a northern asylum. Drawing from hospital case records, newspaper articles, census data and psychiatric literature, this dissertation tells the story of what happened when African Americans confronted psychiatry in one Midwestern state.
Url: https://search.proquest.com/docview/304721435/abstract/FF0B1137912D4BFBPQ/1?accountid=14586
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Authors: Harris, Sean, J
Institution: University of Illinois at Chicago
Department: History
Advisor: Schelbert, Leo
Degree: PhD
Publisher Location: Chicago, IL
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Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Health, Other, Race and Ethnicity
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