Far from passive recipients of questionable treatments, nineteenth-century asylum patients formed their own opinions on what constituted effective care. Patients’ critical views occasionally appeared in asylum periodicals that were published throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with various degrees of patient involvement. Though institutionally supervised, these publications platformed views that challenged contemporary medical ideas and…
Author: Mila Daskalova
Dr Mila Daskalova is a British Academy and LKAS Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow. Her first monograph, The Nineteenth-Century Asylum Periodical (Cambridge UP, 2026), explores patients’ agency and creativity by tracing the history of magazine and newspaper publishing in Victorian asylums. In 2021 she launched and co-edited Podslon, a Bulgarian art and literature magazine dedicated to mental health and illness. She teaches on English Literature and Medical Humanities courses at the University of Glasgow. Her current research project explores nineteenth-century psychiatrists’ engagement with literature in the development of their medical theories and practices.