Philo, Christopher Paul

Chris Philo has been Professor of Geography at the University of Glasgow since 1995. His major research is on the historical geography of madness and asylums, but he has also studied the ‘post-asylum geographies’ associated with deinstitutionalization.

A Geographical History of Institutional Provision for the Insane: From Medieval Times to the 1860’s in England and Wales

2004 0-7734-6509-X
Tackles the historical encounter between madness and space in two interwoven ways. Conceptually, it offers a critical revisiting of Foucault’s famous 1961 text translated as Madness and Civilization. Traces the emergence of an exclusionary impulse seeking to remove those designated as ‘mad’ from the midst of everyday society, and it also maps out the many different sites and institutions that have confined, sheltered, treated and even cured madness over the centuries. Readers can follow the broad historical sweep of the narrative, or they can dip into the relatively self-contained chapters on particular facilities (gaols and workhouses, private madhouses, charitable lunatic hospitals, and public county lunatic asylums).