Work and Occupation in French and English Mental Hospitals, c.1918-1939

Jane Freebody offers a fresh perspective on life in the asylum in both England and France which will be of interest to historians of the institutional everyday as well as historians of psychiatry. In this fascinating and original study, she not only focuses on the less examined interwar period and the importance of patient occupation, but, most strikingly, takes a comparative analysis that goes beyond the transnational into more detailed considerations of place; with an insightful evaluation of the metropolitan versus the provincial in shaping institutional responses.

Clare Hickman, Reader in Environmental and Medical History, University of Newcastle, UK.



This ambitious exploration of patient occupation in interwar French and English mental institutions sheds light on a hitherto under-investigated aspect of life in the asylum – the nature, meaning and therapeutic implications of work for asylum regimes, staff and patients. This is an important and original study of value for anyone interested in twentieth-century psychiatry and institutional practices.

Hilary Marland, Professor of History, Centre for the History of Medicine, University of Warwick, UK.

This open access book demonstrates that, while occupation has been used to treat the mentally disordered since the early nineteenth century, approaches to its use have varied across time and place. Comparing how work and occupation were used in French and English mental institutions between 1918 and 1939, one hundred years after the heyday of moral therapy, this open access book is an essential read for those researching the history of mental health and medicine more generally.



Jane Freebody is a historian of medicine whose research interests revolve around nineteenth- and twentieth-century psychiatry and mental health in France and England. She is an Associate Lecturer at Oxford Brookes University, UK, where she previously gained her Wellcome Trust-funded doctorate.