https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6916-0518
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Ruth Harris, Owen Davies. Troubled by Faith: Insanity and the Supernatural in the Age of the Asylum., The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 460–461, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae594
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In Troubled by Faith: Insanity and the Supernatural in the Age of the Asylum, Owen Davies has conscientiously excavated a seam of medical history to investigate the relationship between religion, faith, and insanity in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain (and Europe). His research reveals how far the history of psychiatry has traveled since the single-minded focus on the Foucauldian fiction of the “total institution” in the 1980s. By placing religious belief about the supernatural—from the demonic through the orthodox to the spiritualist—at the center of his analysis, Davis shows how much of nineteenth-century psychiatry remained preoccupied by religion, even if these beliefs were often pejoratively explored as “superstition.” Well into the twentieth century, physicians found that religious ideas and fears remained important to a good proportion of their asylum inmates. He suggests how the period, rather than secularizing, became in many ways more seriously “religious,” with newly literate populations able to purchase commercially produced Bibles and prayer books. New forms of Christian worship and belief, such as the Pentecostals, believed ever more fervently in the presence of the Holy Spirit, while new movements—particularly theosophy and spiritualism—often stressed the presence of departed souls in the lives of the living. He is quite right to insist that the arrival of science and technology hardly erased fears of the supernatural. On the contrary, fluids and currents in telegraphy, telephones, and phonographs were often perceived as dangerous precisely because of their invisible and otherworldly capacity to invade and disrupt body and mind.
