Curatorial Conversations VII

We are keen to sustain an online conversation about the intended shape of our new museum as far as we can into 2012, responding to and inviting response from those involved in workshops held as part of our recent community consultation, those who have recently published relevant reflections – particularly the contributors to Coleborne and MacKinnon’s 2011 volume Exhibiting Madness in Museums – and as many of our blog readers as are willing and able to participate.

In Exhibiting Madness, David Wright and Nathan Flis write of contemporary “commemoration rituals” inspired by a shift towards “historicising the mental hospital” in ways that “differ in fundamental ways from previous methods of remembering the lunatic asylum, such as scholarly books on individual hospitals or the ubiquitous asylum museum run by volunteer staff and patients”.

They argue that these rituals are inspired, at least in part, by the embrace of “what might be seen as a subtle new form of anti-psychiatry, where motifs borrowed from memorialisations of the Holocaust, the First World War and American slavery are adapted to the political aspirations of ‘psychiatric survivors’ organisations.”

“Aided by a sympathetic press eager to write about the ‘gothic’ conditions in institutions”, they continue, these initiatives “are notable for the inclusion of senior figures of the psychiatric establishment who, for reasons of fundraising and political sensitivities, have paradoxically embraced problematic narratives of their own profession’s past…The ‘dark past’ of institutional psychiatry is then repackaged by the psychiatric elite to show how far the psychiatric profession has progressed.”¹

[to be continued]

¹ D. Wright and N. Flis, ‘A Grave Injustice: The Mental Hospital and Shifting Sites of Memory’, in Catherine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon eds., Exhibiting Madness in Museums: Remembering Psychiatry through Collections and Display (Routledge, 2011), page 102.

An Extraordinary Life 1

Antonia White’s Beyond the Glass, the last in the sequence of autobiographical novels which began with Frost in May, was briefly reviewed on this blog last year; a biographical sketch of the author herself appeared at the same time. In the book, White fictionalises the experiences of her early adulthood: her dysfunctional relationships, mental breakdown, treatment at Bethlem Hospital, subsequent recovery and discharge, and religious disaffection. According to the preface of the 1979 edition, her “relationship with Catholic belief and practice has always been intense, a wrestling to live within its spiritual imperatives in a way which accorded with her own nature, clinging to her faith, as she says, ‘by the skin of my teeth’.”

“To a modern reader”, the preface continues, “these could be seen as experiences intimately connected with [her principal character’s] slow progress towards madness, but to Antonia White they were influences which were also profoundly enriching, in no way negative, part of an extraordinary life which she recalls with a mixture of astonishment and laughter”.¹

The letters which were published as The Hound and the Falcon: The story of a reconversion to the Catholic faith form a fascinating counterpoint to Beyond the Glass. In 1942 White was asked by the editor of Horizon to write something about her recent return to the Catholic fold after fifteen years away from it. She did so diffidently, conscious that her non-Catholic friends were “extremely kind” to her whenever the subject arose in conversation “as they would be to someone suffering a distressing illness or a mental aberration”.² In the event, the editor refused to publish the piece she wrote, saying that reading it “was like watching a person making desperate attempts to retain their reason and finally lapsing into insanity”.³ Many years later, it was published alongside a series of letters written by White to a confidante in 1940-41, the time of her reconversion. These letters demonstrate an earnestness, a warmth and a humanity which gives the lie to any lazy, blanket equation of intense religious concern with mental imbalance – an equation with as little genuine foundation, but perhaps as much intellectual allure, as the one that is sometimes posited between creativity and ‘madness’.

¹ Antonia White, Beyond the Glass (Virago, 1979), p. 6.

² Antonia White, The Hound and the Falcon: The story of a reconversion to the Catholic faith (Virago, 1990), p. 162.

³ ibid., p. xix.

Biography and Psychology V: Henry Francis Harding (1826 – 1896)

In September 1896, the editor of Bethlem magazine Under the Dome had “a very serious loss” to report: the death of the un-official “Sub-Editor”, Henry Francis Harding, at the age of seventy. Harding had contributed regularly to the magazine since its foundation, compiling a regular column, Notes Apropos, (which related articles in the outside press to events in Bethlem and vice versa), writing a variety of articles on historical and other topics (signed X. or H.F.H.) and compiling the index to each annual bound volume.¹ In addition, Harding received credit in publications going beyond the Hospital. When Theo Hyslop’s Mental Physiology was published in 1895, he thanked “his friend, Mr. H.F. HARDING, for revisal of the proof-sheet”.²

It would not be obvious from either of these sources that Henry Harding was,throughout this time, a patient at Bethlem, although Harding himself made no secret of this fact. Indeed, he often took it upon himself to remind others of the need to avoid the potential separation (at least to outsiders) between the official function of the hospital and its therapeutic one. For example, in a lengthy report of the opening of the new recreation hall in June 1896 by the Duke of Cambridge, Harding listed the many prestigious persons present, before concluding:

Last but not least (seeing that the raison d’être of the Recreation Hall and of the Hospital, generally, is the patients, and which, it should be added, is practically and in kindly form recognised by those governing, or otherwise controlling the inner life of the Hospital), we were pleased to see present a fair contingent of the said patients, with nurses and attendants..³

In one of his earlier columns, Harding commented that “we who write these notes are of the genus patient (species: “Voluntary”) – and very patient, if a somewhat lengthy abiding in Bethlem be taken – and should it not? – as evidence thereof.”.⁴ When he wrote these lines in 1893, Harding had indeed been at Bethlem for an unusually lengthy period, following his admission in December 1886. His casenotes state that the former Law Stationer (who had left work the previous March, feeling “overworked”, perhaps not surprising at the age of 60), came to Bethlem ”because he felt his misery & agitation would make him lose control.” Nonetheless, he was never certified, and it is entirely possible that it was Harding’s personal situation, rather than his state of mind, that led to his lengthy stay. Elderly and un-married, Henry seems to have come to regard the Hospital as the family he never had, emphatically stating of Bethlem: “therein are we not a happy family! We are, we are…”.⁵

While it is obvious to see the benefit to the Hospital of such an enthusiastic advocate, Harding also reminds us that life within the Hospital was varied, and one person might have multiple roles. Henry Harding was not “just” a Bethlem patient, but also Sub-Editor, social campaigner, chronicler, companion and friend: someone who could legally have left Bethlem at any point, but chose not to. An unusually personal note in the usually factual Physician’s Weekly Report of 19 August 1896 records that “Mr H Harding VB has died of natural causes & his loss will be much felt.”

Photograph of Henry Harding, c. 1886

¹ “Mr H.F. Harding”, Under the Dome , vol. 5, no. 19 (Sept 1896)
² Hyslop, T.B. Mental Physiology, London (1895)
³ Harding, H.F. “Opening of the Recreation Hall by H.R.H. the Duke of Cambridge” Under the Dome, vol. 5. No. 18 (June 1896)
⁴ Harding, H.F. “Notes Apropos” Under the Dome, vol. 2, no. 8 (Dec 1893)
⁵ Harding, H.F. “Notes Apropos” Under the Dome, vol. 2, no. 7 (Sept 1893)

A Sporting Chance 1

Sport and other pastimes formed an important part of the therapeutic efforts of psychiatric hospitals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In a short series of posts, of which this is the first, we make none-too-serious suggestions for new Olympic sports, inspired by hospital-organised recreation at Bethlem and elsewhere.

In 1878, Edward Walford observes that “on the men’s side” of Bethlem there “is a billiard-room, to which the most hopeful cases among the male patients have access under certain restrictions. This is a large apartment, which, but for its furniture, would look like an immense and lofty green-house, since it is almost entirely glazed above the height of about six feet—a plan which ensures a capital light upon the table. Around the room are raised cushioned seats for those who desire to watch the play; while nearer the fire a large study-table is filled with magazines, journals, and general literature.”¹

Walford’s implication that billiards was a male-only pursuit is misleading; photographs held at the Archives & Museum show billiard tables on both men’s and women’s wards. Nor was the game the sole province of Bethlem’s patients. Recalling his medical student days, the psychiatrist and pioneer anthropologist W.H.R. Rivers wrote in his book Conflict and Dream (1923) that “Dr [Maurice] Craig and I [were] residents together at Bethlem Hospital many years ago, where we had frequently played billiards, and as he was by far the better player, I…learned much from him.”²

Is it too much to hope that a few civilised games of billiards will feature in the London 2012 Games?

¹ Edward Walford , ‘St George’s Fields’, Old and New London: Volume 6 (1878).

² W.H.R. Rivers, Conflict and Dream (1923), p. 43.

Windows onto the Past II

[ continued from previous post ]

In treating the early history of Bethlem Hospital, Edward O’Donoghue does not shrink from retrospective diagnosis of those who were brought to the shrine of Thomas á Becket for healing in the twelfth century. “Matilda of Cologne”, he wrote in 1914, “would find her place in a refractory ward today”.

“Her language was foul, she tore her clothes to pieces, and struck at everyone who tried to remove her. She also was tightly trussed, and thus bound she raved on for four or five hours [in the vicinity of Becket’s tomb], but by degrees she came to herself, when she said that she had seen in a dream the ‘martyr [Thomas] clothed in pontifical vestments with the blood streak across his face’.” ¹

This is a fair summary of the contemporary account of the miracle given by Benedict of Peterborough, but it omits the explanation given by Benedict of Matilda’s mental turmoil, which is twofold. At one level, the cause of her troubles was simply stated to be a “devil” who “left behind foul traces” at the time it was “driven out”. Yet Benedict intimates that there is more to Matilda’s case – or another way of looking at her case – than a solely supernatural perspective might offer. “When we asked her how she came to be insane, she said that her brother had killed a young man who loved her dearly, and that in a fit of madness she had struck with her fist her baby son [fathered by the murdered man, perhaps?]…and removed him from this world.” ²

This agonising story has a psychological depth that transcends the centuries. Matilda, we are told, left Canterbury “healed and joyful, concerned…about nothing but gaining forgiveness for her crime”. Both her torment and her recovery are vividly represented in the Cathedral windows (with rather less psychological realism, we venture to say) by the state of her hair. Interestingly, they were also the subject of a dramatic re-enactment staged in Canterbury Cathedral in 2009 by postgraduate students at the University of Kent.

Those interested in finding out more about medieval miracle accounts such as those of Benedict of Peterborough may consult Wonderful to Relate: Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval England (Philadelphia, 2010) by Rachel Koopmans of Toronto’s York University.

¹ Edward O’Donoghue, The Story of Bethlehem Hospital from its Foundation in 1247 (London, 1914), p. 72.

² J.C. Robertson and J.B. Sheppard (eds.), Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, vol. II (London, 1876), pp. 208-209.

Images used with the kind permission of the Dean and Chapter of Canterbury Cathedral