This thesis examines in depth the six borough and county asylums of Hampshire and Sussex between 1845 and 1930. The research is of an interdisciplinary nature and offers a synthesis of archaeological, historical, and sociological methodologies. The primary focus is on the standing asylum buildings. Fieldwork has been used to establish a permanent record of the building complexes prior to their imminent destruction and redevelopment and has provided a basis upon which to examine the quality of these buildings as places of treatment and cure. This fieldwork has then been coupled with extensive documentary research in order to repopulate the asylum with the patients and staff that lived and worked within them. The key themes of this study are designed to provide a three dimensional analysis of the buildings in order to assess their quality and effectiveness. These themes include: reading gender, status and control from the building complexes; understanding the epidemiology of the asylum populations; establishing the effectiveness of the asylums as hospitals in view of asylum borne disease; and charting the asylum building genre evolution over a period of eighty years as a design response to providing better treatment and care. In order to do this over 6,000 separate patient transactions have been incorporated. Asylum buildings have received little attention from archaeologists or historians. No asylum building to date has been rigorously researched. This study takes six asylum buildings, extensively examines them, repopulates them, and evaluates their effectiveness. This is done within the context of the original purpose of the asylum commissioners, the epidemiological facts, and the current historiographical debate.