In the Spotlight: Edward Oxford

At the outset of this series of posts, we explained that In the Spotlight would feature “people of previous generations who spent time as Bethlem or Maudsley Hospital patients …whose lives became defined … by their achievements rather than by that experience”. In July and August we departed from this principle slightly by introducing patients with noted relatives, and this month we feature someone who was obliged to go to the greatest lengths to distance himself from his time in the Hospital and the circumstances that led to his admission.

On Constitution Hill in 1840, Edward Oxford (1822-1900) laid in wait for Queen Victoria’s carriage to pass, and fired two pistols (whether or not they were loaded was a point of later dispute) in its direction. No-one was hurt, but Oxford was apprehended and put on trial for his attempt on the life of the Sovereign. The jury was presented with copious evidence in support of the defence plea of insanity, and despite the confusing and sometimes contradictory nature of that evidence, returned a verdict of ‘guilty but insane’. Consequently Oxford avoided both prison and the noose, and was instead sent to the State Criminal Lunatic Asylum (which was maintained at Bethlem until the opening of Broadmoor Hospital in 1863-64), where he was detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure. From the outset, he showed no sign of mental derangement, and employed his time at Bethlem by learning a succession of trades and foreign languages. Put simply (in the words of the scholar F.B. Smith), “Bedlam was his university”.¹

In 1867, after Oxford’s transfer to Broadmoor, Her Majesty made her pleasure known courtesy of the Secretary of State: he was pardoned and released on condition of his permanent emigration from the British Isles. Relocating to colonial Australia, Oxford quite literally made an entirely new name for himself as John Freeman, journalist (we may presume for the Melbourne Age or Argus) and author of Lights and Shadows of Melbourne Life (London, 1888).

A short biography of Edward Oxford is available online, courtesy of Berkshire Record Office. The Australian author Jenny Sinclair has a fuller treatment in preparation, and a popular history of all the would-be assassins of Queen Victoria is being written by Paul Murphy, a University of Colorado professor. We’ll make blog announcements when these are published.

1 F.B. Smith, ‘Lights and Shadows in the Life of John Freeman’,Victorian Studies, vol. 30 no. 4 (Summer 1987), p. 468.

Body and Mind: A Historical Problem?

“To talk about the mind,” historian Roger Smith suggested in the final keynote of the recent EAHMH conference on the topic of Body and Mind in the History of Medicine and Health, “is to use shorthand for modern western talk about people.” Concluding a fascinating array of papers at this biennial conference of the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health, Smith directly addressed a theme on which many speakers touched: is the mind-body problem a fundamentally historical one? Certain ways of looking at the natural world suggest we should hold a linear perspective: that knowledge changes in order to explain being. Yet, from another perspective, knowledge and being can be considered to change together. Do modern concepts of ‘self’ based in brain neurobiology or pharmacology actually create new ways of being human?

Despite shifts in scientific thought, Smith reminds us that much everyday language remains dependant on mental, rather than biological, categories. Neuronal concepts of mental functioning might appear to contradict the very notion of free will (just as nineteenth century physiological theories threatened to), but other fields, most notably the legal system, continue to attribute significance and responsibility to mental actions. Thus, it is not simply a criminal act alone, but the motive – and even the emotions of the accused (for example, remorse) - that determine punishment.

Psychiatry has long grappled with the variety of ways in which culture and history shape our concepts of mental health and illness, as indicated in a panel on the classification of mental illness. Rhodri Hayward, for example, discussed the ways in which, in the 1970s, psychiatrists attempted to deal with temporality in the onset of illness. How do we determine whether past events have shaped a present illness, or if the present illness has caused a re-evaluation of the past? Indeed, as Katherine Angel suggested in her discussion of ‘Female Sexual Dysfunction’, the frequently used metaphor of a pendulum swinging between biological and psychological models of mental health and illness does not do justice to the complexities of the body-mind debate. Yet the very popularity of such metaphors serve, for many, to reinforce a distinction that suggests only one (the biological) can be “real”, while the psychological is somehow ”imaginary”. As the conference indicated in a number of different areas, questions about the body-mind relationship have frequently been raised in medicine, for a variety of reasons and in a variety of historical contexts. Many of these questions have a particular resonance in contemporary society.

His Powers of Walking I

Regular readers will know that this year we have been blogging about patients of the past who have had their moment In the Spotlight of ‘fame’; and that from time to time we have drawn attention to others, such as Walter Abraham Haigh, whose names are unknown to posterity but whose stories are exceptional. Our recent blog thread of First Person Narratives provides evidence that this is an ongoing phenomenon. One of our aims in highlighting stories like these is to pay homage to the individual quiddity of all Bethlem’s patients, even though not every story can be told.

The Canadian author and researcher Aislinn Hunter has just drawn our attention to another such story, that of Robert Cowtan, a librarian at the British Museum admitted to Bethlem at the age of 60 in 1877 in a manic state brought on, as recorded in the admission register, by overwork. In Hospital Cowtan proved a prodigious letter-writer, addressing himself to the Lunacy Commissioners (who had the duty of inspecting asylums and hearing patient appeals), fellow patients (one of whom appeared to have become the object of his unrequited affection) and outside friends alike.

Like a great number of patients admitted between 1870 and 1929 who showed signs of improvement, Cowtan was temporarily transferred to Bethlem’s convalescent unit in Witley near Godalming, Surrey. The daily regime of this unit was mild and its environs pleasant, affording opportunities for escorted rural walks, for example, but the chief attraction of transfer to Witley was the associated prospect of departure from Bethlem after a month in the country.

Unusually, however, Cowtan stayed only eleven days at Witley, and rather than being discharged recovered upon his return to the Bethlem’s main site in Southwark, he was transferred to the ward in the Hospital reserved for those with the most challenging behaviour. All that appears in his medical record between the note of his transfer to Witley and his return is the cryptic line ‘Has great belief of his powers of walking’. In the event, Cowtan left the hospital in what the hospital considered to be a fit mental state a full eleven months after his abortive stay at Witley.

What, if anything, took place while Cowtan was at Witley? We are delighted to say that Aislinn Hunter has agreed to take up the story from here.

[to be continued]

The Art of Psychiatry

The question of how the media treat issues of mental disorder forms part of the inspiration for our ongoing series of Curatorial Conversations; and how patients use creative media in their recovery journey could be considered to be part of the sub-text of our monthly In the Frame posts. Next month (Tuesday 8 November) the Royal Society of Medicine is to hold a day conference treating both of these themes, at which event the Co-ordinator of the Bethlem Gallery will speak. Details of the programme and an online booking facility may be found here; early bird discounts expire today!

Curatorial Conversations III

[continued from an earlier post]

The American Journal of Bioethics recently devoted an entire issue to a range of responses to the ‘plastinated’ body shows of Gunther von Hagens, from attempts to justify them in terms of their perceived educational value through to their condemnation as an affront to human dignity: ‘human death and memory merit treatment of a sort that is fundamentally violated by Von Hagens’ plastination project’.¹ On the blogosphere, campaigners have taken matters further, pressing their case in the starkest of terms and urging exhibition boycotts.

Coming to a museum near you! Katrina Victims’ Bodies on Display! Twenty African, African-American, unclaimed and unknown victims of this hurricane tragedy are artistically dissected and posed in lifelike educational exhibits…This exhibit does not exist, thankfully, not because there aren’t unclaimed victims of Katrina…[but] because of the staggering outcry an exhibition like this would bring…

How about twenty dissected and unclaimed Jews? How would you feel? How about twenty Chinese? Wait. Twenty Chinese? Twenty Chinese on display without their consent. Where’s the outrage? Bodies: the Exhibition, opening February 1, 2008 at Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal, is just such an exhibition. Preserved and dissected Chinese bodies are being put on display without their consent.

If you died today, would you volunteer to be stripped of your skin, pumped up with liquid plastic, cut up, and posed in a museum display? Maybe, yes, maybe no. But at least that would be your choice… If you donated your body to science, would you expect it to be seen at a casino?… Travelling exhibitions like this are big business in the same tradition as carnivals and freak-shows of the 19th century… Museums with higher ethical standards will not allow exhibits such as this.²

For evidence that the specific issue raised in Coleborne and MacKinnon’s Exhibiting Madness in Museums about psychiatric patients’ bodies is a live one, one need look no further than recent media speculation concerning the contents of the New Churchyard near Bethlem. As we pointed out earlier this year, this speculation was unsupported by any reliable estimates concerning Bethlem’s patient population or mortality rate, or by any evidence that the Hospital’s pauper patients were more likely to be buried in this churchyard than other London paupers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the light of this, we are entitled to ask: What, then, fuelled this speculation?

This specific issue is not one with which we have had to deal directly at the Archives & Museum. Ours is not that kind of collection. Our general position, however, is this: our current efforts and our future planning are aimed at challenging interest in our collections that is merely prurient, and the concept of a freak-show is frankly abhorrent to us. We are committed to keeping the human dignity of patients, past and present, at the heart of everything we do.

1 Anita L. Allen, ‘No Dignity in Body Worlds: A Silent Minority Speaks’, The American Journal of Bioethics, vol. 7(4) (2007), page 24.

2 Morris Tai, ‘Bodies: the Exhibition in Cincinnati. Unethical. Bodies shown without consent of the dead’ [blog post], 28 January 2008, available online, partially cited in Gretchen Jennings and Maureen McConnell, ‘The Unexhibitable: A Conversation’, The Exhibitionist, vol. 27(2), Fall 2008, available online.