"The world outside these walls": Toronto's Provincial Lunatic Asylum in Context, 1830-1882

This dissertation explores the place of Torontos Provincial Lunatic Asylum within the broader social, cultural, and political landscape of nineteenth-century Ontario (Upper Canada). The development of the asylum in Upper Canada was one part of a broader institutional reform movement intended to codify, segregate, and rehabilitate the provinces criminals, lunatics, and other social deviants. I argue that the lunatic asylum was fundamentally shaped by its place within this broader institutional suite. At once a medical, political, and social space, the asylum was mobilized by various individuals and associations to serve a variety of interests. The Provincial Lunatic Asylum was a liminal institution. Its value as a resource for the growing Upper Canadian medical profession, its place within entrenched systems of partisan patronage, and its status as a charitable public institution ensured that the fate of the lunatic asylum was tied to the life of the province. By situating the asylum within its broader social, political, and cultural contexts, this study enhances our understanding of the role of public institutions like the asylum in the early formation of the Canadian state. Moreover, this study sheds light on the intricate connections between lunacy care and the everyday life of Upper Canadians from many social and cultural backgrounds. It is a study not only of the role of the asylum in the development of a nation, but also the fundamental role of the local and transnational contexts of mid-nineteenth-century Upper Canada on the development of a peculiarly Canadian asylum. This is the story of both an institution and the world outside its walls, spanning a range of topics including the professionalization of medicine, the birth of a political culture, the institutional development of Upper Canada and Toronto, working- and middle-class labour, and the experiences of ordinary Upper Canadians living with lunacy.