Although World War I is commonly regarded as a pivotal moment in the history of psychiatry, there has been limited research into the impact of the war on civilian lunatic asylums, both during the conflict and in the immediate aftermath. Building upon the expanding body of literature on this topic, including Claire Hilton’s seminal work on civilian lunatic asylums in London (2020), this paper seeks to focus on the war’s impact on the care and maintenance of lunatic patients at the six Lancashire asylums at Lancaster (1816), Rainhill and Prestwich (both opened in 1851), Whittingham (1873), Winwick (1902) and Whalley (1915). Based on ongoing research on national, regional and local sources, including minutes from the Lancashire Asylums Board, Board of Control and asylum annual reports, casebooks and the local press, this paper examines how the international crisis arguably both triggered and accelerated changes that were already underway in the management and care of the insane patients as well as in the working conditions of the asylum staff. It will particularly focus on the disruption produced countywide as the asylums at Winwick and Whalley were taken over by the War Office in 1915, followed by the Annexe at the Whittingham asylum in 1917. The subsequent repeated transfers of patients to already overcrowded institutions in a context of major shortages in staff and material goods profoundly altered life in the asylums during the war. On the other hand, the continuing debates on the structural flaws of the “Poor Law of Lunacy” (Peter Bartlett) as the war hospitals were slowly returned to the asylum authorities from the War Office in the early 1920s also encourage further historiographical reflection on periodisation in asylum history.

Claire Deligny (PhD) is a senior lecturer in British history at the Université Paris Nanterre (France). Her research mainly focuses on the social history of psychiatry in the long nineteenth-century in Great Britain. A member of the CREA research group (Université Paris Nanterre) and EuroHealthHist COST network, she is currently a Visiting Fellow in the History of Science, Medicine and Technology at the Maison Française d’Oxford (Trinity term 2025). She is currently writing a book on the history of the Lancashire asylums in the long nineteenth century and has been co-organising a series of international conferences on the history of psychiatry in the English-speaking world (Who Cares Conference series 2025-2027: whocares.hypotheses.org).