The beer ration in Victorian asylums.
Routine distribution of alcoholic beverages to mental hospital patients would be a fanciful prospect today, yet in the formative decades of lunatic asylums, beer was standard issue. A staple item in the supposedly healthy Victorian asylum diet, beer also served as inducement for patient labour. Around the mid-1880s, this commodity was abolished throughout Britain's mental institutions. This paper explores the factors that combined to condemn the beer barrel to asylum history, and, in particular, how this small comfort for immates fell foul of the medicalization of the asylum and of the professional project of psychiatry.
McCrae
Niall
N
Box PO 26, Health Services Research Department, Institute of Psychiatry, Denmark Hill, London SE5 8AF, UK. Email: sphsnmc@iop.kcl.ac.uk
D001515:Beer / Q000266:history*; D005521:Food Service, Hospital / Q000266:history*; D049672:History, 19th Century; D006778:Hospitals, Psychiatric / Q000266:history*; D010361:Patients / Q000266:history*; D013695:Temperance / Q000266:history*; D006113:United Kingdom