“The world outside these walls”: Toronto’s Provincial Lunatic Asylum in Context, 1830–1882 Maximilian Smith A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Programme in History York University Toronto, Ontario September 2019 © Maximilian Smith, 2019 Abstract This dissertation explores the place of Toronto’s Provincial Lunatic Asylum within the broader social, cultural, and political landscape of nineteenth-century Ontario (Upper Canada). The development of the asylum in Upper Canada was one part of a broader institutional reform movement intended to codify, segregate, and rehabilitate the province’s criminals, lunatics, and other social deviants. I argue that the lunatic asylum was fundamentally shaped by its place within this broader institutional suite. At once a medical, political, and social space, the asylum was mobilized by various individuals and associations to serve a variety of interests. The Provincial Lunatic Asylum was a liminal institution. Its value as a resource for the growing Upper Canadian medical profession, its place within entrenched systems of partisan patronage, and its status as a charitable public institution ensured that the fate of the lunatic asylum was tied to the life of the province. By situating the asylum within its broader social, political, and cultural contexts, this study enhances our understanding of the role of public institutions like the asylum in the early formation of the Canadian state. Moreover, this study sheds light on the intricate connections between lunacy care and the everyday life of Upper Canadians from many social and cultural backgrounds. It is a study not only of the role of the asylum in the development of a nation, but also the fundamental role of the local and transnational contexts of mid-nineteenth-century Upper Canada on the development of a peculiarly Canadian asylum. This is the story of both an institution and the world outside its walls, spanning a range of topics including the professionalization of medicine, the birth of a political culture, the institutional development of Upper Canada and Toronto, working- and middle-class labour, and the experiences of ordinary Upper Canadians living with “lunacy.” ii Acknowledgements Dissertations are written in solitude, and yet they are impossible to write alone. I am indebted to many people for their help and support over the past four years. My doctoral supervisor, Professor Marlene Shore, has been instrumental in guiding my intellectual development and curbing some of my more “persistent” bad writing habits. I could not have asked for a more supportive supervisor. Thank you as well to Professor Deb Neill and William Jenkins, whose advice and kind encouragement kept this project on the rails. I would also like to thank the members of my examining committee, Professors Kate McPherson, Kenton Kroker, and Jeffrey McNairn for their enthusiastic and very helpful comments on my work. The staff of the History Department at York University work tirelessly to keep the wheels turning and the lights on. This dissertation could not have been written without them. Parts of this dissertation were shared at conferences at the University of Buffalo, the University of California, Berkeley, and York University, as well as the annual conference of the Canadian Historical Association, the Canadian Society for the History of Medicine, and the Canadian Society for the Digital Humanities. Thank you to the staff at Library and Archives Canada, the Archives of Ontario, the Toronto Archives, and most especially to John Court and the Friends of the Archives at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health for the research assistance and financial support. Thanks as well to the Avie Bennett Historica Chair in Canadian History. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to my family for their constant encouragement and support, and especially to my wife Ashley for her love and inspiration. To my Oma and Opa, who were so delighted to see this work begin, and who are not here to see its end, thank you for the evenings spent discussing my research, the delicious dinners to distract from it, and your undying belief that I would succeed in all of my endeavours. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract ………………………………………………………………………….. ii Acknowledgements ……………………………………………………………………… iii Table of Contents ……………………………………………………………………….. iv Tables ………………………………………………………………………….. v Figures ………………………………………………………………………….. vi Introduction ………………………………………………………………………….. 1 Chapter I From Prisoners to Patients: The Origins of Lunacy Reform in Upper Canada, 1791–1839 …………………………………………………….. 25 Chapter II “I only needed biscuit and milk and beef and tea to make me well”: Community Care, Domestic Medicine, and the Therapeutic Origins of Asylum Reform ………………………………………………..……. 51 Chapter III “A very noble work”: The Intellectual Foundations of Asylum Care in Upper Canada, 1830–1839 ……………......………………………… 79 Chapter IV “A theatre of party bickerings”: Toronto’s Asylum in Upper Canadian Political Culture ……………………………………………………....... 132 Chapter V The Medical Profession in Toronto: Professional Organization, Institutional Geography, and the Asylum, 1839–1857 ………………… 187 Chapter VI “A little confinement might do her some good”: Criminal Justice, Community Regulation, and the Peopling of the Provincial Lunatic Asylum, 1841-1865 ……………………………………………………. 231 Chapter VII “The fury of the wave of popular delusion”: Professional Conflict, Public Opinion, and Early Inspectoral Reform, 1854–1859 ………........ 283 Chapter VIII “Experts at everything except insanity”: Bureaucratization, Custodialism, and Inspection in Ontario, 1857–1882 …………………. 320 Conclusion A Gloomy, Lightsome, Gleaming, Darksome Place ………………....... 356 Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………….. 367 iv Tables 2.1 Country of birth of patients at the temporary lunatic asylum ………… 58 v Figures 1.1 Toronto Jail/Temporary Lunatic Asylum ……………………………... 26 5.1 The Provincial Lunatic Asylum, c. 1867 ……………………………… 188 6.1 William Cruikshank’s “Police Court Sketches” ………………………. 252 6.2 William Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress ………………………………… 265 8.1 Report of the Inspector of Prisons, Asylums, & Public Charities ……... 343 vi Introduction Toronto’s Lunatic Asylum and the New Upper Canadian Social Order Between 1830 and 1839, Upper Canadian reformers and lawmakers gradually negotiated the establishment of the province’s first lunatic asylum in Toronto.1 Their decision to implement state-supported institutional lunacy care in Upper Canada represented an informed and publicly deliberated response to the over-crowding of the province’s decrepit system of local jails, which housed an increasingly large number of lunatics throughout the early decades of the nineteenth century. The Provincial Lunatic Asylum, which officially opened in 1850, was at once regarded as a symbol of medical advancement and a product of emerging liberal ideas about the segregation and institutionalization of various classifications of social deviance. It soon became evident that the asylum had other uses, however: the institution was a valuable tool for the advancement of political and professional agendas, a site for the negotiation of socio-economic status and respectability, and a source of social cachet for an emerging middle class of doctors, lawyers, and newspaper editors. Toronto’s “madhouse” was a medical space for the care and cure of lunatics, certainly, but few doubted that it was also a partisan space, where those same lunatics were frequently exploited as material and discursive capital in the political machinations of Upper Canada’s ruling classes. 1 Lunatic/lunacy, insane/insanity, and other contemporary terminology will be used throughout this dissertation to describe the class of people who were labelled and segregated on account of their supposed mental difference in nineteenth-century Canada. I use these terms because they have no modern analogue. The men, women, and children who were labelled as lunatics in this period did not necessarily suffer from what we might today call mental illness. Their identification as lunatics sometimes arose from their anomalous social practices, their idiosyncratic modes of expression, or their deviant political or religious beliefs. As such, the terms lunatic and mentally ill are not interchangeable. My adoption of these terms does not constitute an endorsement, but rather an effort to reflect as accurately as possible the context of their contemporary meanings and usage. 1 Drawing on a rich vein of administrative and patient files, private correspondences, medical periodicals, and newspaper articles, this dissertation re-examines the history of Upper Canada’s first asylum in an effort to demonstrate its significance not only to members of the medical profession, but also to people from all levels of Upper Canadian society, many of whom entertained their own ideas about who should hold the reins of such an important institution. The asylum may have been the product of legal enactment by a centralizing Canadian state, but its development and management was shaped as much by negotiations between independent professional and political actors as it was by top-down statecraft and high-minded ideas of hegemony and social control. To illustrate the impact of individual doctors, politicians, and other Upper Canadians on the development of the asylum, the study analyzes the complex channels of patronage which shaped early nineteenth-century