Teaching Gender in Social Work - MailChimp

fore overwhelmingly women over sixty-five years of age who did not have any
financial protection or state pension. 29
As mentioned earlier, there were a significant number of women who
were locked in large asylums, but there were an even larger number who stayed
under the domestic control of the medical eye, and carried the images of mad
women of the nineteenth century. These women, together with some men in
large asylums, were exhibited to a wide public. Foucault reported that as late
as 1815 London’s Bethlehem Hospital (Bedlam) exhibited lunatics for a penny
to local spectators every Sunday. 30 Only a few years later Jean Marie Charchot
exhibited young women who were labelled as hysterics every Thursday in front
of a distinguished Parisian public. 31 The black and white photograph of him
and a young woman who he was hypnotising can still be seen today in Vienna,
in the museum of his great pupil Sigmund Freud.
Teaching questions
1. Document cases of violence in the public realm, especially in public
care institutions; examine the gender specificities, common
patterns, professional responses to institutional violence and public
responses to institutional violence.
2. Collect visual material of persons, places and areas connected with
metal health history; examine the history of institutions and
psychiatric treatments.
Diagnosis, Violence and Sexual Politics
As pointed out by Sander Gilman, “fin-de-siecle medicine madness was marked
not only on the face but also on the genitalia”. 32 Each country invented its
health police to discover, control and punish particularly women prostitutes,
who were the “embodiment of the degenerate and diseased female genitalia
in the nineteenth century”. 33 The Slovene discourse on social medicine was
strongly influenced by the Italian psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso, who invented
29
Ibid.
30
Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilisation. A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Random
House, 1988), 68.
31
See von Braun 1988.
32
Sander L. Gilman, “Sigmund Freud and the Sexologists: A Second Reading,” in Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Science,
ed. Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1994), 326.
33
Ibid.
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