This collection consists of a two-volume edition of primary source materials that document the asylum in the long nineteenth century. The focus of the collection will be on rare and difficult-to-access published and archival materials, arranged by topic criteria. Each volume will be a sort of 'compendium' of rarer sources. There is an introduction to the whole set and word introductions to each volume together with headnotes to each document or section of documents contextualizing the sources and pointing out anything particularly noteworthy.

The sources feature all kinds of publications and archives including documents, laws, newspapers, medical texts, journals and books, etc. that can be considered nineteenth century primary/archival sources difficult to access. This two-volume edition has a very close connection with the history of medicine, the history of sexuality and the history of insanity in the long nineteenth century as well as with the history of institutions to contain and control the mentally insane and the sexually ‘deviant’.