Wellcome Library archive sheds new light on history of mental healthcare

The Retreat by George Isaac Sidebottom, a patient at the York Retreat, one of the first institutions where people with mental health problems were treated with dignity. Photograph: Borthwick Institute for Archives

Talk of Victorian asylums conjures up images of manacled and wretched patients suffering callous and ineffective treatments or being gawped at by a morbidly fascinated public like exhibits in a human zoo. However, a new project to digitise historical psychiatric records reveals an enormous range of care in the 18th and 19th centuries, including more genteel treatment for the upper and middle classes, as well as early developments in art therapy.

The Wellcome Library part of the Wellcome Trust is creating an online archive of more than 800,000 pages of documents from private and public asylums featuring doctors notes and patients artwork and writing.

It is working with other archives across the UK to provide fascinating detail of institutions efforts to improve the morals and morale of patients.

Lesley Hall, a senior archivist at the Wellcome Library, explains that there was a market in psychiatric care that mirrored the class system, from institutions that catered for the middle classes, such as the Camberwell House asylum, in south London, to the most exclusive, such as Ticehurst House hospital in Sussex.

Ticehurst really was the lunatic asylum of choice for mad dukes, she says. It positioned itself in the market place to appeal to people who could afford quite high fees to make sure their insane relative is being cared for in very pleasant rural surroundings, in beautifully landscaped grounds and with a very high staff-patient ratio, shesays.

Somewhere like Camberwell House asylum never really appealed to what you might call the carriage trade. They ended up in a kind of public-private arrangement with the local Poor Law authorities to take in pauper lunatics under a contract because there is no large local authority asylum in the area at that time.

The York Retreat, founded by William Tuke and the Society of Friends (Quakers) in 1792, was one of the first institutions where people with mental health problems were treated humanely and with dignity. Katherine Webb, archivist at the Borthwick Institute for Archives in York, which holds the historical records on the retreat says: The great difference between workingclass and middle-class care isthat the families of potential middleclass patients could choose what asylum they could send their relatives to. If you were working class you didnt have that choice.

The flip side of this was that the best private asylums could afford to be picky with the patients they accepted. Ticehurst, for example, avoided taking violent patients. However, the records show there was some unruly behaviour. Hall says: I rather like the case of the Reverend Patterson who was a Church of England clergyman who behaved in a very un-reverend fashion. He threw a chair through a window, he expressed himself in violent and coarse language and he also groped the male servants. But thats quite unusual. You dont often get the sense they were sexually violent at the Ticehurst.

Facebook

Visit link:
Wellcome Library archive sheds new light on history of mental healthcare