Exhibiting Madness in Museums: Remembering Psychiatry Through Collection and Display

While much has been written on the history of psychiatry, remarkably little has been written about psychiatric collections or curating. This innovative volume offers a comparative history of independent and institutional collections of psychiatric objects around the globe. Leading scholars in the field investigate collectors, collections, their display, and the reactions to exhibitions of the history of insanity. Linked to the study of medical museums, this work broadens the study of the history of psychiatry by analyzing, for the first time, the significance of twentieth-century psychiatric communities in the preservation, interpretation, and representation of the history of mental health through the practice of collecting. No text has ever before examined the extensive practice of psychiatric collections throughout the world necessary to generate a representative history of psychiatry. This collection of essays spanning the nineteenth to the twenty-first century includes themes from the history of psychiatry and medicine, anthropology, biomedical ethics, and museum studies, using case study evidence from Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, opening new research trajectories with major implications for scholars working throughout Europe, the Americas, Asia, and South Africa.