The female patient experience in two late-nineteenth-century Surrey asylums

This chapter will investigate how cultural perceptions of gender influenced the diagnosis, confinement and treatment of those women deemed as 'suffering' from a wide range of mental disorders during the latter years of the nineteenth century. Rather than merely illustrating the female patient experience by analysis of only one institution's population, here, two widely contrasting nineteenth-century Surrey asylums come under scrutiny. Brookwood Asylum was a large Poor Law institution, while a mere twenty miles away the middle classes were being treated at the exclusive Holloway Sanatorium.Thus, the question of class in relation to gender and incarceration can also be explored.