I live in the shadow of the Toronto Asylum, in Parkdale, Toronto's great ghetto for gays, blacks, paupers, psychiatric survivors, etc. The neighbourhood begins at the overpass for the Canadian Pacific Railroad, where King and Queen Streets symbolically descend a little, so as not to interfere with the trains. Joseph Workman, Medical Superintendent 1853-1875, the "Nestor of Alienists," fretted that the steepness would cause accidents. He also wanted the structure to be aesthetically pleasing, since it was so close to "his" grounds. What marked the boundary of the Asylum, now marks the beginning of Parkdale. The patients of the Queen Street Mental Health Centre, the successor of the Toronto Asylum, rent the neighbourhood's old houses and apartment buildings, more or less out-patient boarding-homes, many of them fire-traps. Workman observed that asylum treatment was at least better than an auto-da-fe; occasionally it seems no different. The following is a discussion of the writings of the patients, inmates, and principal alienists of the Toronto Asylum, circa 1840 to 1920, organized around such themes as the relationship between medical authority and authorship, the textuality of disease, and the meanings of asylum. My principal thesis is that doctors in rather self-interested ways constructed medical authority as authors, by troping the asylum and its diseases until, thanks to the perceived failure of things like "moral therapy," and professional self-interest, they "virtually" troped it out of existence. I describe this troping in the doctors' own texts, focused on the Toronto Asylum, because of its paradigmatic, long and troubled history. In the process I have probably reversed the usual relationship of such texts to history; what are usually treated as glosses are here treated as main text. Toronto's asylum doctors looked and gazed, but they also read and wrote. Their texts demonstrate, among other things, the persistent and even obsessive textuality of medical authority, even as they themselves protested -- too much -- that it was based on something more. These texts parallel, are affected by but also help to facilitate developments in the history of alienism and early psychiatry, from the failure of "moral therapy," through the depressing period of "custodial care," to the beginnings of clinical psychiatry, the "discovery" of dementia praecox, and the "Mental Hygiene" movement of the 1920s. These texts describe a kind of North American "birth of the clinic," not the austere Foucauldian clinic of the 19th-century, but something related to it in its capacity to generate, however crudely but viciously, the knowledge that not only enhances its power but also disseminates it. Of this phenomenon it is appropriate to ask, as Foucault does of the 18th-century clinic, whether one can rightfully "transform into an object of clinical observation a patient whose poverty has compelled him to seek assistance" (83), or whether it is not "a tacit form of violence ... upon a sick body that demands to be comforted, not displayed" (84). The latter question dogs not only C.K. Clarke's vociferations in the name of the Asylum on behalf of the clinic, but also the rhetoric of his predecessors, George Hamilton Park, Daniel Clark, and above all, of Joseph Workman, Clarke's mentor as well as predecessor. In their various arguments, in pamphlets, articles, and annual reports these doctors continually display the bodies of the sick, to no good effect. Ironically, instead of the "dense and wealthy population of a metropolitan city," which the original commissioners anticipated in the 1840s would mean a steady supply of students, an ever-growing population of urban poor supply it with variously depicted "plagues" of masturbators, monomaniacs, erotomaniacs, paretics, degenerates, schizophrenics, defective immigrants, low to high-grade morons, and feeble-minded women. The doctors play fast and loose not only with these diseases but also with the poor who seem to be especially vulnerable to them, and whose diseases it is difficult if not impossible to distinguish from poverty. The diseases vary with the role of the Asylum in professional imagination, but their epidemic and endemic character remains constant. Beginning in the 1960s historians such as Erving Goffman, Gerald Grob, David Rothman, Ellen Dwyer, Constance McGovern, Roy Porter, and Andrew Scull have narrated the origins and described the character of asylums and mental hospitals. Most of their studies have been influenced by Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization: A History of Madness in the Age of Reason, with its idea of the "great confinement," and its systematic debunking of the "Whiggish" or naively "progressive" view of such history. The most significant of these historians, Andrew Scull, has refined and qualified his earlier Foucauldianism (arguing that the idea of the "great confinement" is itself a myth, or a development peculiar to French history), but has retained and more clearly articulated his connection of the rise of the asylum in England to the development of a market economy. He remains an eloquent critic of psychiatric "professionalism." The following parallels these earlier histories, as in some ways it must, as a study of texts focused on an institution subject to the same economic and social forces as any other in a developing capitalist society. But it is also intended to elaborate another issue initially raised by Foucault, the absolute separation of reason and non-reason which he argues characterizes attitudes to madness in the "Age of Reason," and marks its "constitution as a mental illness" (x). The texts that form the basis of this study, because of the common affiliation of their medical authors, together comprise a peculiarly intense "monologue of reason about madness" (x-xi) which helps us to understand some of the effects on discourse of its separation from its ostensible subject. The peculiar character of these texts owes much to their being "monologues," an effect on the sane of their silencing of the mad. Despite (or because of) their monologic character, these texts are also curiously lopsided, self-incriminatingly polyvalent, and embarrassingly lacunar. At the risk of further one-sidedness, I confess that I sometimes read in them the "mirror writing" of the "silenced" mad, an effect on the sane of their silencing of themselves. Please note that, till further notice, this item is availabe to users of the archive, only to digitally copy for reading, entire and unaltered, including the author's name and copyright on every page, strictly for personal and individual, non-insitutional, non-commercial use. It may not be hosted elsewhere, without permission.