Description
Book SynopsisBetween the San Francisco earthquake in 1906 and the Great Depression in 1929 the San Francisco Superior Court committed more than 12,000 city residents to the insane asylums of California. Who were these people? What brought them to the attention of the court, and what behavior did the medical examiners cite as evidence of insanity? What do these commitments reveal about the social and cultural meaning of insanity and other forms of deviant behavior in industrial California--and by extension in the rest of urban America in the early twentieth century? This book--the fist historical study of insanity to analyze thousands of court commitment records--provides an original look at the social, institutional, and professional web in which deviant individuals were officially judged so far disordered in mind that they were dangerous to be at large.A full two-thirds of all those committed were, to judge by the court records, odd, peculiar, or simply immoral individuals who displayed no symptom
