Remembrance of Patients Past: Patient Life at the Toronto Hospital for the Insane, 1870-1940

William Glassman is a professor of psychology at Ryerson Polytechnical
University in Toronto.

The author, a research fellow in history at the University of Toronto,
was hospitalized with schizophrenia while a teenager. In this book, he
sets out to avoid an unfortunate characteristic of many historical
accounts of psychiatry: the marginalization of people with mental
disorders. While his personal experiences clearly inform the book, the
focus is on the patients themselves. Their voices, as expressed in
archival records of the Toronto Hospital for the Insane, are interesting
and sometimes moving, and the focus on patients’ reports provides a
useful complement to more conventional accounts of the field of
psychiatry.

However, Reaume’s methodology (selecting only cases where information
about the individual’s perceptions are available) and interpretations
raise questions about balance and representativeness. Because the
selection of cases is far from random, there is no simple way to
determine if conclusions based on them are more generally appropriate or
not. This issue is not trivial, since the author is rarely content to
let the cases speak for themselves; instead, he uses the material to
make specific comments and criticisms (e.g., about the role of social
class in determining both diagnosis and treatment). In the end, one
wishes that Reaume had been more willing to let the patients’ accounts
speak for themselves.