‘The Music of the Band’: music and mental wellbeing in the nineteenth century

This paper explores the notion of music as a therapy within the psychiatric institutions that dominated mental health care in nineteenth-century Britain. It opens with some key background and questions around the ‘power’ of music, as well as the ways in which music was utilised in insane asylums during the period. At the core of the paper is a poem by poet John Reid Adam, or ‘Iram’ (), ‘Song – Music a Mental Medicine’, which depicts a man within one of the asylums whose melancholy is lifted by the experience of the dance. The poem not only contrasts the grief and woe of the man prior to the dance with his uplifted spirits and revitalised behaviour; it also hints at a longer-term beneficial effect. I will conclude the paper with reflections on the ways in which the impact of music portrayed in the poem are echoed in modern-day contexts.