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Rachael Bailey-Gibson, ‘Dr Adele Isabella de Steiger – A Pioneering Victorian Alienist’

The history of psychiatry has long emphasised the contribution of Victorian male alienists/psychiatrists such as John Conolly (1794-1866), James Crichton-Browne (1840-1938), and Henry Maudsley (1835-1918). Yet, in the centre of a photograph among the male senior asylum staff of Essex Pauper Lunatic Asylum (above) sits Dr Adele Isabella de Steiger (1868-1944). Dr de Steiger was one of the first female alienists in the country, but her contribution to psychiatry has been entirely overlooked. This paper considers Dr de Steiger’s career from her training at the London School of Medicine for Women, supervised by Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (1836-1917), the first woman to qualify as a physician and surgeon, to her appointment and work at Essex Asylum that spanned twenty-five years until her retirement in 1921. Dr de Steiger’s notebook from 1893, lent to me by her great-nephew, will also be explored. This rare source gives an insight into her personal thoughts, influences, and motivations, bringing her fascinating and inspirational work to life. Additionally, her writings give us a better understanding of patient treatment and care, especially for women and how and why psychiatry changed towards the close of the long nineteenth century.

Rachael Bailey-Gibson is a Future 100 Centenary Scholarship Postgraduate Researcher. She is in the second year of her PhD programme. Her thesis, supervised by Dr. Claire Wood, is titled ‘Remote Benevolent Despots?:The English Alienist Psychiatrist, 1845-1921’.

Amber Vella, ‘“Fanny […] will have Croft to attend her”: elite women’s opinions of Sir Richard Croft, accoucheur to Princess Charlotte of Wales’

Following a fifty-hour labour that resulted in the birth of a stillborn son, at 2:30am on 6th November 1817 Princess Charlotte of Wales died. During the profound period of national mourning that followed, the decisions of Sir Richard Croft, physician-accoucheur to the Princess, were intensely scrutinised. Three months later, Croft committed suicide while attending Mrs Thackeray in labour. Croft gained popularity among elite women following his attendance on Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire in Paris in 1790. We know little about him or his practice beyond reports of his attendance on the above-named women, yet in the decades in between 1790 and 1817, Croft would have attended many elite women during their pregnancies and labours. This paper presents the perspectives of two women who considered or employed Croft to attend them during their pregnancies and labours in the early nineteenth century. Henrietta de Grey (1784-1848) and Frances Bedingfield (1796-1822) experienced numerous pregnancies and pregnancy losses in their lifetimes, the details of which were discussed in letters exchanged amongst their families. This correspondence illuminates elite women’s opinions of Sir Richard Croft both before and after his fatal attendance on Princess Charlotte, adding a crucial – and previously overlooked - perspective to current scholarship on the event: the women Croft attended in his regular practice. This paper therefore contributes to a growing body of scholarship that demonstrates the value of women’s life writing to histories of the body and medicine, and argues that elite women were astute when assessing potential birth attendants during the early decades of the nineteenth century.

Amber Vella is in the third year of her PhD, supervised by Dr. Claire Brock. Her thesis is titled ‘“she looks well, but is in her Constitutional Uncertainty”: pregnancy in late Georgian Britain’.

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