The great restraint controversy: A comparative perspective on Anglo-American psychiatry in the nineteenth century

The restraint controversy proved all the more painful because the several specialties had so much else in common. By placing the great restraint controversy in a broad professional context, this chapter attempts to describe it as a significant episode in the development of Anglo-American psychiatry. It aims to show how the interplay between internal factionalism and international rivalries lent the great restraint controversy its peculiar intensity; and to relate different therapeutic issue to the deeper differences in the degree of centralization and class segregation that characterized the two asylum systems. John Charles Bucknill denied that the use of restraints in the United States was part of ‘a system of negligence and inhumanity’, characterizing American asylums as on the whole well managed. In the context of their own factional strife, the timing of Bucknill’s criticism could not have been worse for the American leadership.