"Sort of Tragic and Serene:" Southern Women and Insanity from 1880 to 1920
Abstract
The case files used from the South Carolina Mental Hospital have three
stories to be told within their lines. The first story was that of the hospital
administrators. The asylum form itself set a certain standard of criteria that
administrators wanted recorded about these patients, such as name, race, diagnosis,
"predisposing cause," "exciting cause" and "civil condition." The terms exciting
and predisposing cause were inconsistently defined by the entrance physicians.
However, the term "predisposing cause" can be mostly be defined as the foundation
of an illness. The most common example of this was "hereditary," meaning cases of
insanity ran within the patient's family. "Exciting cause," another required field,
can be defined as the immediate cause of insanity. Bouts of insanity were often
described by "attacks," meaning specific intervals in time in which the patient
expressed symptoms of mental illness. Thus, an exciting cause described what
brought on the most recent "attack." One such example is "childbirth." The last
important term, "civil condition," simply means marital status. In this section,
physicians recorded whether a patient was single, married, or widowed. These
forms and the medical terms they used set the parameters of diagnosis in which
physicians worked.