Alum Wendy Gonaver wins the Simkins Prize
Cindy Hahamovitch, B. Phinizy Spalding Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Georgia had this to say about our alum Wendy Gonaver ...
The Committee received forty-one (41) submissions published in 2019 and 2020. Many of these were exceptional and wide-ranging studies of Southern history broadly defined. The Committee selected Wendy Gonaver’s The Peculiar Institution and the Making of Modern Psychiatry, 1840-1880 (University of North Carolina Press). It is a beautifully written and shockingly original history of nineteenth century asylums and the relationship, as the title suggests, between modern psychiatry and American slavery. As a doctoral student in American Studies at the College of William & Mary, Gonaver discovered a vast collection of uncatalogued asylum records in Colonial Williamsburg’s archive, which she spent years organizing and mining as the basis for her remarkable history of slavery’s influence on the formation of modern psychiatry in the United States.
Gonaver focuses on two asylums, the nation’s first--the Eastern Lunatic Asylum in Williamsburg, Virginia --which was founded in 1773, and the Central Lunatic Asylum in Petersburg, Virginia which was the first mental facility created especially for African Americans. She introduces readers to John Minson Galt II, the pioneering and provocative psychiatrist who ran the Eastern asylum as an integrated facility even before the Civil War, and who, controversially, accepted free Blacks and slaves as patients alongside white patients. Galt even assigned enslaved people as staff. The very fact that enslaved people were admitted as patients and served as staff who confined white patients is but one of many significant findings in Gonaver’s fascinating book. The prose is compelling, and the research is impeccable.
Locating these unusual institutions in the larger context of nineteenth century psychiatry and southern social history, Gonaver reveals both the strange and the horrifyingly normal, such as the belief that southern women’s reproductive and sexual organs—rather than the violence they had experienced—accounted for their insanity. She also shows that Galt and others believed evangelical faith and anti-slavery sentiment were signs of psychiatric disorders. Gonaver discovered daily logs of patients’ behavior and the treatments administered, which she uses to reconstruct patients’ lives and staff members’ beliefs. She imbeds these intimate details within nineteenth century understandings of not just psychiatry but also racism, misogyny, slavery, emancipation, and religion. Ultimately, she shows, “staff and patients were daily faced with the possibility that it was the asylum’s mission—and the slavery that shaped and supported it—that was peculiar, and not necessarily the patients.” (112)