The state, by the end ofthe century, is able to wrest control oftreatment through an alliance with the Catholic Church and 'impose state regulation on medical treatment and administration within asylums.' State control in Ontario, however, took a very different tack. The first chapter traces the 'farming-out' system through the history of the Beauport Asylum's professional and proprietary ambitions to control the treatment ofinsanity in Quebec. This case is used to situate Committed to the State Asylum as a 'study of the process of patient committal,' which, he says, 'is crucial to a reconceptualization of the history of the asylum and insanity.' After placing this work in the context of asylum historiography, Moran uses the following chapters to expand on his approach. To illustrate the approach and focus of many of the previous works in the history ofinsanity, Moran starts with Sophie Mercier's life in the parish of St-Jean-Baptiste des Ecureuils, Canada East, and her subsequent incarceration in the Beauport Lunatic Asylum in 1853. After a brief introduction, in which Moran situates his work within the historiography ofinsanity, the reader is led through five chapters that cover the social history of the nineteenth-century lunatic asylum. He supports the idea that specific building types, such as asylums and prisons, symbolize the grounding ofauthority in the state during periods ofunrest or transformation. $65.00 cloth, $27.95 paper In this excellent book, Committed to the State Asylum, James Moran argues that there is a close connection between the social history of asylum building in Quebec and Ontario and the early development of a mid-nineteenth-century Canadian state apparatus. Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen 's University Press 2oor. ROBERT ALDRICH University ofSydney Committed to the State Asylum: Insanity and Society in Nineteenth-Century Quebec and Ontario. With much information and a perceptive analysis, it shows how communications, in a literal and metaphorical way, bound France together with its possessions and helped leave a lasting imprint on areas of French dominion in the Americas. Steele's 1986 study of The English Atlantic, and it is a worthy companion volume. 'The greatest hindrance to open communication and close elite cooperation,' he states, 'may have been competition and cultural perceptions, not distance or difficulty oftravel.' Banks's book was inspired, he points out, by Ian K. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ħ66 The Canadian Historical Review the fractious nature of colonial society.
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