This essay argues that historians will gain a deeper understanding of the nosological ritual and the professionals who enacted it by placing internal developments of late nineteenth-century psychiatry alongside the synchronic rise of the linguistic sciences. Doing so demonstrates that, contrary to historical consensus, what fell out of favour were traditional methods of observation rather than the practice of classification itself. Through an analysis of the aural culture at St Elizabeths Hospital (Washington, DC) between 1877 and 1911 as evidenced by patient case files and diagnostic training manuals, I focus on shifting methods of psychiatric audition as primary sites of professional claims to legitimacy at a time when the specialty was under attack from critics both external and internal.
AgnewA (1886) From Under the Cloud; or, Personal Reminiscences of Insanity. Cincinnati, OH: R. Clarke & Co.
2.
AitkenW (1868) The Science and Practice of Medicine, 2nd US edn. Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston.
3.
American Psychiatric Association (1944) One Hundred Years of American Psychiatry. New York: Columbia University Press.
4.
AMPA (American Medico-Psychological Association) (1886) Handbook for the Instruction of Attendants on the Insane. Boston: Cupples, Upham & Co.
5.
AndrewsSD (2005) ‘Which threatens to tear our fabric asunder’: the opposition to American spiritualism, 1848–1860. Unpublished PhD thesis, Stanford University.
6.
BienJ (1860) NicholsC.H., sup’t; surveyed by CoyleJohn M.WalterThos. U., arch’t; ground plan designed by NicholsC. H., sup’t. Maps of Saint Elizabeths Hospital, Washington DC, Library of Congress.
7.
BullMBackL (eds) (2003) The Auditory Culture Reader. New York: Oxford International Publishers Ltd.
8.
BynumWF (1994) Science and the Practice of Medicine in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
9.
DarnellR (2008) North American traditions: the historiographic baseline. In: KuklickH (ed.) A New History of Anthropology. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 35–51.
10.
DarwinC (1859) The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. London: John Murray.
11.
DarwinC (1871) The Descent of Man, and the Selection in Relation to Sex. London: John Murray.
12.
DarwinC (1873) The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. New York: D. Appleton and Co.; first published in 1872.
13.
DavisAB (1981) Medicine and its Technology: An Introduction to the History of Medical Instrumentation. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
14.
EarleP (1887) The curability of insanity, study first, written in 1876. In: The Curability of Insanity; A Series of Studies. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 7–63.
15.
EsquirolE (1845) Mental Maladies; A Treatise on Insanity, trans. HuntEK. Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard; originally published in French in 1838.
16.
GoddingWW (1883) Two Hard Cases: Sketches from a Physician’s Portfolio. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company.
17.
GoldsteinD (1994) ‘Yours for science’: the Smithsonian Institution’s correspondents and the shape of scientific community in nineteenth-century America. Isis85(4): 573–599.
18.
GrobGN (1994) The Mad Among Us: A History of the Care of America’s Mentally Ill. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
19.
HaleNGJr (1971) Freud and the Americans: The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in theUnited States, 1876–1917. New York: Oxford University Press.
20.
HaleNGJr (1995) The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in America: Freud and the Americans, 1917–1985. New York: Oxford University Press.
21.
HurdHMDrewryWFDeweyRPilgrimCWBlumerGABurgessTJW (eds) (1917a) The Institutional Care of the Insane in the United States and Canada, Volume II. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
22.
HurdHMDrewryWFDeweyRPilgrimCWBlumerGABurgessTJW (eds) (1917b) The Institutional Care of the Insane in the United States and Canada, Volume IV. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
23.
KuperA (1988) The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformations of an Illusion. New York: Routledge.
24.
LinkerB (2011) War’s Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
25.
LubbockJ (1870) The Origin of Civilization and the Primitive Condition of Man. London: Longman.
26.
LunbeckE (1994) The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
27.
McCandlessP (1996) Moonlight, Magnolias, and Madness: Insanity in South Carolina from the Colonial Periods to the Progressive Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
28.
McLennanJM (1865) Primitive Marriage: An Inquiry into the Origin of the Form of Capture in Marriage Ceremonies. Edinburgh: Black.
29.
MillikanFR (1990) Wards of the nation: the making of St Elizabeths Hospital, 1852–1920. Unpublished PhD thesis, George Washington University, Washington, DC.
30.
MooreRL (1975) The spiritualist medium: a study of female professionalism in Victorian America. American Quarterly27(2): 200–221.
31.
MorganLH (1877) Ancient Society: Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization. New York: Holt.
PowellJW (1881) On the Evolution of Language; As Exhibited in the Specialization of the Grammatical Processes, the Differentiation of the Parts of Speech, and the Integration of the Sentence; From a Study of Indian Languages. Washington: Government Printing Office.
34.
PowellJW (1891) Indian Linguistic Families of America, North of Mexico. Washington: Government Printing Office.
35.
RayI (1847) Shakespeare’s delineation of madness. American Journal of Insanity3: 291.
36.
ReiserSJ (1978) Medicine and the Reign of Technology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
37.
RosenbergC (1995) The Trial of the Assassin Guiteau: Psychiatry and the Law in the Gilded Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
38.
SchaferM (1969) The New Soundscape. Scarborough, Ont., and New York: Berandol.
39.
SchaferM (1994) The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books.
40.
SchmidtLE (2000) Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
41.
ShawJ (1892) Epitome of Mental Diseases. New York: E.B. Treat.
42.
SilvermanS (2005) The Boasians and the invention of cultural anthropology. In: HannC (ed.) One Discipline, Four Ways: British, German, French, and American Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 257–274.
43.
SmithMM (2001) Listening to Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
44.
SpitzkaEC (1887) Insanity: Its Classification, Diagnosis, and Treatment. New York: E. B. Treat.
45.
SterneJ (2003a) The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
46.
SterneJ (2003b) Medicine’s acoustic culture: mediate auscultation, the stethoscope and the ‘autopsy of the living.’ In: BullMBackL (eds) The Auditory Culture Reader. New York: Oxford International Publishers Ltd, 191–217.
47.
SummersM (2010) ‘Suitable care of the African when afflicted with insanity’: race, madness, and social order in comparative perspective. Bulletin of the History of Medicine84: 61–94.
48.
ThompsonE (2002) The Soundscapes of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
49.
TylorEB (1865) Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilizations. London: John Murray.
50.
TylorEB (1871) Primitive Culture. London: John Murray.
51.
WhiteSWhiteG (2005) The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History through Songs, Sermons, and Speech. Boston: Beacon Press.
52.
WhitneyWD (1875) The Life and Growth of Language. London: Henry S. King and Co.
