Goodfellow Lecture at WC Examines Mental Illness in Early America

CHESTERTOWN, MD — The ways in which early American settlers dealt with mental illness is the topic of the spring 2020 Guy F. Goodfellow Memorial Lecture at Washington College on Feb. 20. Cornelia Dayton, professor of history at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, will discuss her research.

The event in Litrenta Lecture Hall in the Toll Science Center begins at 4:30 p.m. and is free and open to the public.

Dayton will address research from her work-in-progress in Boundaries of Sympathy: Law and the Experience of Mental Affliction in Early New England, “An ‘Open’ Asylum: Seeking Treatment in Andover, Mass., 1770-1840.” Drawing on New England sources from the late 1600s to the early 1800s, when no asylums existed and only a handful of private care arrangements for the well-connected were in operation, Dayton explains that laypeople, including family members and townspeople, were the primary caregivers and decision-makers when someone suffered from mental illness or cognitive disability.

“I will discuss white settlers’ ways of talking about mental trouble, as well as their primary responses—Christian compassion, household workarounds, legal exculpation, and other protective mechanisms. Underscoring the gender, race, and class limits on such sympathetic treatment, I will go into some detail about three types of crises that could arise,” she says.

Among other publications, Dayton is a contributing scholar to Women’s America: Refocusing the Past (Oxford University Press, 2020), and co-author of Robert Love’s Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston (with Sharon V. Salinger, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), which won the Merle Curti Award for the best book in U.S. social history published in 2014 and the Littleton-Griswold Prize for the best book on U.S. law and society published in 2014.

Through the Department of History, the Guy Goodfellow lecture series brings nationally renowned scholars in American history to campus.