The Female Malady 86 dress, she had chosen a ruffled shirtwaist decorated with jewelry, leaves, wide sleeves, and a wide and unflattering {o her heavy demand tasteless as to belt, a costume too features, but hardly, sequestration 35 girlish for her years it would seem, so "Sane" dress obviously had to coincide with male superintendents' views of suitability for class and age As the photographs of madwomen medical texts reveal, moreover, in Victorian doctors imposed cultural stereotypes of feminity and female insanity on women who Hugh Welch Diamond, who to the female department residence at Surrey, He argued in the succeeded Alexander Morison as physician at the of psychiatric photography tients The advent of phomanagement of women Dr defied their gender roles tography provided a valuable aid in Surrey Asylum in 1848, Diamond photographed many of photography had a that was the pioneer England During the ten years of his women his pa- significant function in the asylum, not only as a record of patients and a diagnostic guide to insane physiognomy, but also cially, al he maintained, as a therapeutic tool it was women For patients espe- salutary to have this reminder of person- appearance, and to have the natural feminine vanity, dulled by dis- ease, stimulated by a photographic portrait T N Brushfield, superin- tendent of the Chester County Lunatic Asylum, mond lecture on asylum photography wrote that "patients are very much portraits In our worst female ward at gratified I who had at seeing their Charles Hood by any of the own have had a positive (on glass) framed and up for nearly eighteen months, and yet been touched heard Dia- the Royal Society in 1852, patients." At Bethlem, it has never Sir William noted that "the taking of portraits has become one of the pleasures of which the patients cheerfully partake in our lunatic asy- lums; and helps to diversify and cheer the days spent in necessary seclusion from the busier, but scarcely happier world, without." gave the case of a woman patient who had He worried about the portrait because she thought her dress was unbecoming, but whose "sense of propriety" was satisfied by being "represented with a book in her hand." 36 Diamond atric particularly valued photography for its objectivity: psychi- photographs, he believed, provided permanently valid records of types of insanity, "free altogether from that painful caricaturing which so disfigures almost all them nearly valueless the published pictures of the Insane as to render either for purposes of art or of science." 37 Indeed,