{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,11]],"date-time":"2025-10-11T13:27:42Z","timestamp":1760189262731},"reference-count":0,"publisher":"Cambridge University Press (CUP)","issue":"3","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2012,5,17]],"date-time":"2012-05-17T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1337212800000},"content-version":"unspecified","delay-in-days":321,"URL":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/terms"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Med. Hist."],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2011,7]]},"abstract":"<jats:p>Self-inflicted injury, or \u2018self-harm\u2019, has been a topic of much debate in recent years. The media in the Western world has tended to portray the issue as an increasing \u2018trend\u2019, relating it to various contemporary concerns, including the so-called \u2018celebrity culture\u2019 and urban decline. The past decade in the UK has seen the publication of various clinical guidelines, a National Inquiry into Self-Harm in young people, and almost continual media speculation. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, speculation also occurred around \u2018self-mutilation\u2019, an area newly defined by alienists (asylum psychiatrists). This topic has received little historical attention; yet, had \u2018self-harm\u2019 been on the agenda in the 1970s and '80s, nineteenth-century self-mutilation would no doubt have been presented as part of a discourse on professionalisation, in which the creation of a new psychiatric category was presented as part of the \u2018medicalisation\u2019 of psychiatry, through observation and classification within asylums. More recently, a changing historiography has led to histories of self-harm being located within a schema for \u2018making up\u2019 people, such as attention to the development of a patient profile for the apparently new behaviour of \u2018delicate self cutting\u2019 in the mid-twentieth century. This article builds on this concept to explore broader social issues around the creation of the concept of \u2018self-mutilation\u2019, which help to explain the occurrence of an impetus for \u2018making up people\u2019 in a particular period or culture. In particular, the impetus is related here to changing ideas of what constituted the \u2018self\u2019 and the relation of the individual to society in the late nineteenth century.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1017\/s0025727300005433","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2012,5,17]],"date-time":"2012-05-17T14:35:59Z","timestamp":1337265359000},"page":"375-382","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":10,"title":["Self-control, Selfishness and Mutilation: How \u2018Medical\u2019 is Self-Injury Anyway?"],"prefix":"10.1017","volume":"55","author":[{"given":"Sarah","family":"Chaney","sequence":"first","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"56","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2012,5,17]]},"container-title":["Medical History"],"original-title":[],"language":"en","link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/services\/aop-cambridge-core\/content\/view\/S0025727300005433","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2019,4,27]],"date-time":"2019-04-27T04:04:33Z","timestamp":1556337873000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/product\/identifier\/S0025727300005433\/type\/journal_article"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2011,7]]},"references-count":0,"journal-issue":{"issue":"3","published-print":{"date-parts":[[2011,7]]}},"alternative-id":["S0025727300005433"],"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1017\/s0025727300005433","relation":{},"ISSN":["0025-7273","2048-8343"],"issn-type":[{"value":"0025-7273","type":"print"},{"value":"2048-8343","type":"electronic"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2011,7]]}}}