Occupational stress and the Victorian Asylum

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This PhD project will permit the consideration of occupational stress on a broad section of nineteenth-century society, and recognition of a de facto typology of occupational stress. It will build on work by Tomkins on medical practitioners to open out the study of occupational stress to the multiple white-collar workers of England, and foster comparisons between these men and another group (to be defined either by gender, work-type, age or other characteristic). The latter will be chosen in collaboration with the student, based on their own interests and in line with a cohort that proves to be prominent among Staffordshire asylum admissions. The student will begin by drawing on asylum admissions papers and casebooks to identify those patients within the scope of the research. The Staffordshire archives asylum collections include 22 volumes of patient casenotes for the first county asylum 1818-1919, and further volumes for Burntwood and Cheddleton (from 1864 and 1899 respectively). This material will be interleaved with existing datasets including census returns and death registration for contextual socio-economic information. The conflation of data about patients from multiple sources will allow the student to devise multiple partial biographies (i.e. prosopographical study) for the better exploration of occupational health.