This chapter investigates how theories of female insanity were formulated and communicated by medical professionals (who were then exclusively male), in the fifty years following the passage of the 1845 Lunacy Act. Psychiatry was in its infancy in the nineteenth century and there was no formalised education in the field, most mind doctors transferring to asylum work after a standard medical degree which contained little teaching in mental disease. In the absence of clinical instruction, psychiatric textbooks had a crucial pedagogic role, both for mind doctors and general practitioners. This chapter discusses how textbooks were instrumental in imparting knowledge of female insanity and in shaping treatment practices of women patients, the constraints of the genre influencing how information was presented. In particular, the form, narrative structure and semantics of the case history were key to how these texts constructed a theory of female madness grounded in reproductive biology.