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BY THE early nineteenth century the dynamics of economic growth, urban expansion, and demographic change had produced both new social problems and new dimensions of traditional problems. Changes in cultural and medical responses to insanity were one outcome, and there emerged a psychiatry based mainly on the experiences of alienists working within an asylum system which, after slow growth in the previous century, rapidly became a taken-for-granted strategy for dealing with the mad. As a first-resort solution to problems created by mental disorder, the asylum was designed initially to cope with afflicted members of society's middling ranks, and was operated on a profit-making basis by medical and lay entrepreneurs. Allegations of illicit con- finement and of brutalities in "madhouses" prompted limited state intervention from the early 1700s. The inadequacy of provision in the handful of subscription hospitals, which grew up in the later eighteenth century, and total lack of provision for the pauper insane, attracted the concern of philanthropists and legislators from the last quarter of the century. Increasingly sophisticated legislation -the lunacy laws - produced by 1845, during an increased tempo of government growth, a centralized bureaucracy to control the "trade in lunacy" and to supervise statutorily-enjoined public provision for the insane poor.' Surprisingly little attention has been paid by administrative historians to the lunacy laws and their invigilators, despite two decades of research and theorizing stimulated by the Parris-MacDonagh controversy and somewhat sterile search for a "model" of government growth.2 During the past decade there has been an increase in the number