The Art of Asylum-Keeping

The Art of Asylum-Keeping is a social history of medical practice in a private nineteenth-century asylum, the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane in Philadelphia. It recreates everyday life in the asylum and explores its social, as well as its scientific, legitimation.

Nancy Tomes is Professor of History at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, and author of The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life.