Joseph Workman

Early life and family

Joseph Workman was born on 26 May 1805 in Ballymacash, a hamlet near Lisburn in Ireland, to a Presbyterian family. His father was Joseph Workman and his mother was Catharine Goudie. He was the fourth son out of nine children.

Workman's ancestry can be traced back to the Puritans, to a man named Reverend William Workman, who worked as a lecturer at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Gloucester, England. During his time, William Laud had recently assumed power as Archbishop of Canterbury and became a staunch opponent of Laud, stigmatizing his edicts during his lectures. Workman was then bought into the Court of High Commission and was convicted of heresy and was then excommunicated and imprisoned.

Reverend Workman soon died of a deep depression in 1633 following his excommunication, leaving behind his family. After his death, his children then moved to Ireland. Two of his grandsons, Joseph and Benjamin, emigrated to Pennsylvania after the American War for Independence and taught at what later became the University of Pennsylvania. After three years, the older Joseph went back to Ireland and settled in Ballymacash, where he married Goudie, a Scottish native from Ayrshire, and had nine children together.

Career as medical superintendent

In 1853, he was hired as temporary superintendent of the Toronto Provincial Lunatic Asylum (now called the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health) to fill up the vacant space left by the previous superintendent John Scott. Workman became a permanent superintendent in April 1854, following's Rolph solicitation for him to be made permanent, winning the majority vote against John Hunter Robinson, a friend of Lord Elgin.

He did not have the experience of being a psychiatrist or managing an asylum before. In 1855, he took a trip to the United States to learn psychiatry and how to run an asylum. He first attended the Medical Convention in Boston, followed by visits in the asylums of New England, such as the Worcester Lunatic Asylum in Massachusetts. In 1859, he took a trip across the Atlantic, where first visited Northern Ireland and visited the Tuke Retreat in York.

During the first years in office, Workman spent his time fixing the problems with the structure of the asylum. One incident involved a typhoid outbreak he attributed to the accumulated pollution under the basement floor, and which had been noticed earlier by the Board of Committees and the Grand Jury, who underestimated the problem. He tasked the workers with rebuilding both the ventilation and drainage systems as well as reconnecting the drainage to the main sewer. During his time at the institution, he spent time testing the idea of moral treatment and doing his own research. He had also advocated for the humane treatment of the insane, treating them with individualized medical attention and nutrition.

He also believed that insanity was a somatic disease, believing that insanity was caused by the changes of the human brain and not by psychological trauma. He connected the cause of insanity to physical conditions such as concussion. Later on in life, he commented on the "religious-emotional" type of insanity and associated religious zealotry with heightened libido and connected zealotry with masturbation and sexual diseases. He also perpetuated the view of masturbation as a major cause of insanity, speaking publicly on the dangers of masturbation to children and elders, making him one of the main perpetrators of sexual psychopathy alongside Charles Kirk Clarke and Richard Maurice Bucke.

After 1853, Superintendents could hire and fire staff, which could build skill and team-building. Building that priority, in the late 1870s, Workman, wanting to educate future psychiatrists and staff, established three internship programs within the Asylum, providing a free room and a small salary to the interns. The internship programs would later launch the careers of Charles Kirk Clarke, whose father, Charles Clarke, was Workman's friend, Thomas J. W. Burgess, who was one of Workman's godsons from the Congregation, and William George Metcalf, who was killed by a patient at the Rockwood Asylum.

He retired as medical superintendent in July 1875.

Marriage and experience in Toronto

On 30 May 1835, five days after he graduated, Workman married Elizabeth Wasnidge, the daughter of cutlery manufacturers. Her father Michael had died of cholera earlier that year, and her mother Ann was planning to move to Toronto to work with her eldest son, William Wasnidge, who had established a hardware business there. At the time of their marriage, Elizabeth was scheduled to leave Toronto. They had 10 children together.

He continued practicing medicine in Montreal up until the following year, when his now brother-in-law had a fatal accident while working at their hardware business. Ann needed help running the business, as their children were still adolescent at the time, resulting in Workman leaving his post and moving to Toronto to take over William's business. Elizabeth's siblings hated Workman as they felt he had taken over, so he started his own under the name of the Workman Brothers Hardware, taking Samuel with him. During this time, he wrote several articles and editorials for reformist newspapers including Francis Hincks' The Examiner.

By 1845, Workman had cofounded the Toronto Region Board of Trade, where he served as its first vice-president. Following his resignation from the business world in 1846, George Percival Ridout awarded him a gold medal as a congratulatory award for his service in the company. That same year, he opened up a medical office in the city. Under the invitation of John Rolph, he lectured on Midwifery and Diseases of Women and Children and later on Materia medica and Obstetrics in the Rolph's School of Medicine (now called the University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine) from 1846 to 1847. He also served as alderman for St. David's Ward from 1847 to 1849, when he resigned on 9 July, likely because the Royal Commission appointed him to investigate the finances of King’s College and Upper Canada College.