The Female Malady? The Relationship Between Madness, Psychiatry and Gender

Speaker: Dr Gayle Davis (University of Edinburgh)

This talk explores the relationship between madness, psychiatry and gender over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, using the Royal Edinburgh Asylum as a case study. It outlines the ways in which psychiatrists linked different types of mental illness to their male and – in particular – female patients, and what values lay behind those differing diagnoses. The talk also considers why mental illness has been characterised historically as the ‘female malady’, and how accurate this characterisation appears to be within the context of Edinburgh psychiatry.