This Is Your Hospital: New Web Resource

The Archives and Museum launches a new web learning resource this weekend, This is Your Hospital, devoted to the middle twenty years of the life of Warlingham Park Hospital. Central to this resource are extracts from a documentary commissioned by the Archives and Museum which combines archive footage and interviews. The documentary was screened for the first time on 10 October, World Mental Health Day, as part of the BBCs ‘Reel History of Britain’ festival, and the Archives and Museum are grateful to the Trustees of South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and Langley Park Boys School in Beckenham without whose support this event would not have been possible. The website also includes photographs, scanned archive documents and patient files, and further learning resources for use in schools will soon be added.

Opened in 1903 as Croydon Mental Hospital, Warlingham Park Hospital was closed in 1999 in common with many other mental hospitals, but remains an important element of local history. The website aims to share the stories of local people: whether former patients, staff or simply members of the surrounding community. The title, ‘This is Your Hospital’ reflects the ideas of Dr T.P. Rees, the Hospital’s Medical Superintendent from 1935 to 1956, who was in the habit of encouraging patients to make some contribution to the life of the Hospital, and to think of it as belonging to them. “People come to a mental hospital”, he used to say, “to learn how to live”. The experiences of some of these people appear in film clips and written reports, and we hope that the resource will grow over time as more stories are added.

Do you have memories of living or working at Warlingham Park Hospital that you would like to share with others? Or do you have an ancestor who was a patient or a member of staff? Visit the website to share your stories.

Chance Encounters in the Museum 2

The Archives and Museum regularly receives visits from psychiatrists and other mental health professionals. This is unsurprising, given that it is itself part of the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, with strong links to the Institute of Psychiatry and other partners inthe provision of mental healthcare. Every now and then, however, visitors arrive from further afield, sometimes as part of a pre-arrangedschool or university group visit, at other times entirely unannounced in ones or twos. Recently we hosted a visit from a group from Athens, and we will be welcoming students from a college in Connecticut later this week. In the past fortnight, we have also bumped into visiting psychiatrists from Vienna and Oslo, both with an interest in the history of European psychiatry in general, and the prominent and a typical place occupied within it by Bethlem Hospital in particular.

This puts us in mind of a parallel phenomenon of the nineteenth century: that of the intra-European collegial visits made by doctors intent on discovering what provision other countries had made for the care and treatment of the mentally ill. These visits, and the reports that were made of them, were a means of highlighting ‘best practice’ (as well as worst), and formed part of a drive towards the ‘moral management’ of patients, the construction of more appropriate hospital buildings, and the establishment of psychiatry as a medical discipline.

A few years ago, the Archives & Museum partnered with museums of psychiatry on the continent to produce a electronic resource to makeavailable (at www.europeanjourneys.org) the reports of four of these nineteenth-century journeys, made by Drs Morison of London and Edinburgh, Guislain of Ghent, Everts of Noord-Holland and Hack Tuke of York respectively. As those who browse the site will discover, the honeymoon of one of these doctors effectively doubled as a psychiatric fact-finding mission. We can only guess at what his spouse made of this.

Understanding Mental Health: Education at Bethlem Archives and Museum

We welcome visits from both primary and secondary schools and whenever possible take the opportunity to talk to teachers about what we can offer and what they feel would be most helpful. That’s why our Education officer was at Kingston University yesterday to speak to students on initial teacher training courses. Museums, archives and galleries can be important resouces for learning outside the classroom and we want to make our collection as accessible as possible.

Mental wellbeing is important to everyone but it can be a difficult subject to raise in the classroom. Yesterday’s session highlighted resources from the museum and archives which had been successfully used with primary aged pupils, encouraging them to discuss emotional wellbeing, identify potential stressful situations and develop coping strategies.

For more information on Education at the Archives and Museum, including booking a visit, go to our website.