‘This is Your Hospital’: Film Screening at Bethlem

Enoch Powell’s famous ‘water-tower’ speech was given fifty years ago this year. In it, he expressed the British Government’s determination to halve the capacity of residential facilities for mental healthcare facilities, and spelt out what this meant for the future: ‘the elimination of by far the greater part of this country’s mental hospitals as they exist today’. As famous as Powell’s speech became, the ideas expressed in it were not new to those who were then at the cutting edge of mental healthcare, and in the 1950s and 60s nowhere was thinking and practice more radical than at one of SLaM’s predecessor institutions, Croydon’s Warlingham Park Hospital. It was the first mental hospital in the country to implement a thorough open door policy, and the first to open a dedicated alcoholic unit. In 1954, two members of Hospital staff, Lena Peat and Reginald Bowen, became the UK’s first community-based psychiatric nurses, heralding the kind of changes in mental healthcare that inspired Powell’s vision seven years later.

By the year of the ‘water-tower’ speech, the Hospital’s outpatient services had found a home of its own in London Road, Thornton Heath (later known as the Oaks treatment centre). In common with other mental hospitals, Warlingham Park’s inpatient services were wound down and eventually closed in the 1990s. Footage of the Hospital, along with testimony from former staff and patients and relatives of patients, will be shown in Bethlem Hospital’s Boardroom on World Mental Health Day – Monday 10 October 2011 – as part of the BBC’s Reel History of Britain campaign. The documentary, This Is Your Hospital, will form part of a new online learning resource on Warlingham Park Hospital and mental health care from 1945 to 1960, on the Bethlem Heritage website.

The free screening starts at 12.30 on Monday 10 October in Bethlem’s historic Board Room (in the main administration block), and will be followed by an opportunity for discussion. Refreshments will be provided.

Curatorial Conversations II

We are grateful for the response received to the first of our posts in our series on Curatorial Conversations, which we hope will inform thinking and practice here at the Archives & Museum as we look toward our intended relocation.

With this series we hope to stimulate an ongoing discussion with as wide a range of our stakeholders as possible. Another of our ‘conversation partners’ is Coleborne and MacKinnon’s recently published Exhibiting Madness in Museums, which, as we mentioned in our previous post, raises a number of insistent questions about exhibitions on psychiatric history. Coleborne and MacKinnon’s work is most relevant to our concerns when it addresses the issue of how psychiatric collections may best be exhibited.

The limited number of psychiatric collections that have been open to the public have met a number of standard responses: large percentages of the viewing public decide to stay away from exhibitions that focus on mental health history; a voyeuristic proportion of the public simply want to gaze at the mad; and finally, former patients, family members, friends and staff, as well as some members of the general public, are interested in attempting to gain a clearer understanding of the experiences of patients and practitioners in psychiatric institutions.

The authors go on to touch upon the issue (hotly contested among museum professionals) of whether there may be some things that are simply unexhibitable.

Sensitive and compassionate exhibitions about specific institutions have found critical acclaim from sections of the viewing public… However, these successes have been complicated and far outweighed by the large proportion of the general public who voraciously consume the private, fee-entry, worldwide travelling collections, such as Gunther von Hagens’ plastination body part shows, as well as his live autopsy shows, some of which have made use of former psychiatric patients’ bodies.¹

[to be continued]

¹ Catherine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon, Exhibiting Madness in Museums: Remembering Psychiatry through Collections and Display (Routledge, 2011), pages 8-9.

In the Spotlight: John Robert Cozens and Bernardo Amiconi

This month we feature two artists, only one of whom was ever a Bethlem patient, the other being widely (and mistakenly) reported to have been such. One was a pioneer watercolourist of Georgian England; the other was an Italian artist of the Victorian age whose biography has been forgotten to such an extent that all our efforts at research have so far ended in frustration.

The works of landscape artist John Robert Cozens (1752-1797) exerted a remote but formative influence on English Romantic painters such as J.M.W. Turner and John Constable, and were the subject of a documentary on watercolours recently shown on BBC1. The documentary’s narrator recounted what has come to be the received version of Cozens’ final years:

A doctor diagnosed him as suffering from ‘a decay of the nervous system’. Today, we’d call it a breakdown. At the age of 42, he was committed to the lunatic asylum, Bedlam. There is a final, bittersweet twist to Cozens’ story. The doctor that looked after him in Bedlam happened to be an art collector, and recognising Cozens’ brilliance, he bought up his pictures, and used to hold get-togethers of up-and-coming young artists, and he would sit them down and suggest that they copied Cozens’ work. Thus it was that a future generation of watercolourists were inspired by a man languishing in an asylum.

This is the received version, but it is incorrect in one important particular. John Cozens certainly was a patient of Thomas Monro, Bethlem’s physician from 1787 to 1816, but he was never a patient at Bethlem. Admissions to the eighteenth-century Hospital were not only restricted to those whose prognosis was promising – as previously noted on this blog – they were overwhelmingly constituted of paupers and the ‘middling sort’. Gentlemen suffering ‘a decay of the nervous system’ would consult ‘mad doctors’ such as Thomas Monro in a private capacity, if at all. This seems to have been exactly what happened to John Cozens: in February 1794 he was received into Dr Monro’s private care, and December 1797 he died whilst still in it. ¹

By contrast with Cozens, whose life and works have been the subject of much comment and criticism, the London-based Italian artist Bernardo Amiconi seems to have left little biographical trace, at least online. We can say that Amiconi was brought to Bethlem Hospital at the age of 48 in mid 1877, fresh from being apprehended by police in the course of attempting to enter Buckingham Palace. Apparently he had claimed not only an appointment with Her Majesty, but a shared nuptial understanding. Within six months, he had died in the Hospital, the inevitable outcome of so-called ‘general paralysis of the insane’, a terminal neurological condition for which no pathological description, let alone cure, was available in the nineteenth century. Why (in the light of Bethlem’s restrictions on admission) was he allowed into Bethlem in the first place? Those suffering from general paralysis ”would not be admitted if the Committee acted strictly within the limits of the regulations”, wrote the Hospital’s Physician Superintendent  in 1883, but ”if [GPI] be not studied in a hospital like Bethlem, which is essentially a hospital for cure and alleviation, I do not see much prospect for its future relief”. In short, Bethlem made an exception to its rules of admission for patients suffering from general paralysis (and then only for those whose families were able to pay for their hospital care). A cure for GPI was eventually found, but not at Bethlem and in any case not until the twentieth century, too late for Bernardo Amiconi and many others like him. To our knowledge, the world awaits a connected narrative of Amiconi’s life and works. We would be glad to hear from anyone who can supply reliable sources on the subject.

¹ A.P. Oppé, Alexander and John Robert Cozens (London: A&C Black, 1952), pp. 116-119.

Unknown, and Unknowable?

Readers of the blog will know that the Archives and Museum’s recent show at the Bethlem gallery, Unknown and Unknowable?, featured work from the collection by anonymous artists.  In curating the exhibition it was interesting to consider how we respond to art with little or no context, no title or date and no clue, other than our own perceptions, as to what we are ‘supposed’ to see, what it’s about or whether it’s ‘any good’?

There were no titles or attributions for the works in the exhibition; the labels merely represented the thoughts and questions they prompted in the minds of the curators.  Visitors were then invited to record their own reflections, responses and suggested titles for the works on display.

This striking image attracted the most comment:

The way out Freedom – one step at a time Slowly crawling out of the depths of despair Keep going up the slope. Hope is above. Dante’s purgatorio

Examples of other comments and alternative titles:

	A Royal Academy Entry The strange observer
	Set in stone
	Angels dancing Ghostly fairies in the dell An appeal for help
	You see my outside self. Only I see my inside self. This I find the most moving piece in the show.
	Prayers before bedtime Mother love A perfect night
	Tables turned!
	Ophelia before
	Silent deliberaton An evening with Dr Smith Posh gatherings Before TV

Further reflections from blog readers would be welcome.

A Former ‘Madhouse’: The Museum Boerhaave

Earlier this month, our Friends’ Secretary paid a short visit to Holland to attend biennial conference of the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health, on the topic ‘Body and Mind’. The weekend included a fascinating visit and guided tour of the Museum Boerhaave (the Dutch National Museum for the History of Science and Medicine) in Leiden. The building in which the museum is housed has a long and complicated history: built as a nunnery in the early 15th century, shortly before 1600 it became a ‘plague hospital and madhouse’ (not the most obvious combination from a modern viewpoint!). Still, as the museum’s collection illustrates, many connections have been made historically between physical and mental illness. During the seventeenth century, standard medical practices were based on humoral theory, in which mental illness (often regarded as due to an excess of black bile in the body) was generally treated by the same techniques as diseases like plague: for example bloodletting, purging and vomiting. The Boerhaave, like other medical collections, has numerous instruments for such practices.

Anatomy is also well-represented in the collection, and a late eighteenth century collection of skulls illustrates the way in which doctors of the time tried to learn about the mind by studying the physical body. One cabinet contains a collection of skulls prepared by Sebald Justinus Brugmans (1763 – 1819), Professor of Medicine at Leiden from 1795 (further indicating the fluid nature of boundaries in the period, Brugmans had previously been a Professor of Physics and Mathematics, and also of Botany). Brugmans’ teaching specimens include animals preserved in alcohol, used for comparative anatomy, as well as human and animal skulls. The image above shows one skull listed by Brugmans as “the skull of a maniac.” During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, it was thought by many that examining the skull could inform the physician about the brain and mental state of the individual. This idea informed anatomist Franz Joseph Gall’s system of phrenology, developed in 1796 and popular well into the nineteenth century. The Bethlem collection contains several phrenology heads (one of which is pictured below), designed to show the “organs” of the brain, which were supposed to correspond directly to human faculties such as capacity for language, affection or pride.

The Museum Boerhaave is currently under threat of closure, with a major fundraising campaign to raise 700,000 Euros by the end of 2011 underway. To find out more, visit Save Museum Boerhaave. As previously mentioned on this blog, the exhibition ‘The Weighty Body (previously at the Museum Dr Guislain), which includes Elise Warriner’s The Anger Within from the Bethlem Art Collection, will open at the Boerhaave in 2012.