Hospital Snapshots 6

One of the aspects that make the Hering collection fascinating is how much they resemble portraits, either painted or photographic, rather than institutional mug shots.  For the most part, the clothing, pose and objects would not look out of the ordinary in a conventional portrait of the time.

Photography, as a new medium in the late 1850s, may well have been something of a novelty for the type of patient Bethlem admitted.  To have a photograph taken in this early period might have been seen as a mark of distinction. Queen Victoria herself had been photographed and the photographic series ‘Living Celebrities’, published monthly by Maul and Polybank, depicted key individuals such as politicians, churchmen and writers, alongside their biographies.  Bethlem’s patients might not only have enjoyed the experience of a photographic session, but have had their own ideas about how they should be shown according to the photographic conventions as they understood them.

As in painting, clothing is an important indicator of circumstance, individuality and taste.  Although the hospital did not issue clothing, for patients choice may have been somewhat limited.   A number are wearing dresses of the same material and style, perhaps because Bethlem bought in fabric and ‘sewing parties’ were held in which the female patients could make  or alter their own clothing.  Despite these constraints many of the photographs show touches of refinement and personality, perhaps giving a hint to the individual themselves.

The patient we know only as EA is dressed as a respectable, middle class woman.  Her clothes are neat and well made but not showy, the material good but not expensive.  Her hair is firmly tied back, though unusually not covered.  There are touches of decoration such as the ruffles on the sleeves of the dress, lace collar and cuffs.  A fringed shawl is draped around her.  She has taken care over her appearance.

In other photographs, clothing and occupation are more closely allied.  Edward Oxford, the would-be assassin of Queen Victoria, is shown here as if taking a break from his decorating.  He appears to be dressed for the task in hand, wearing a painting overall on which can be seen some traces of paint.  Though the shirt underneath looks fairly standard, the tie appears worn for the occasion.

Clothing was clearly, at least to some extent, within the control of the sitter and helped give personality to each image; next month’s post will consider pose and props.

Sign the Visitors’ Book, Please

Anyone who has made the trip to the Archives & Museum will know that one of the first things they are invited to do is sign our visitors’ book. This is old  - pen and paper – technology, but effective enough in affording visitors the opportunity to sign up for our quarterly email newsletter (which can also be done by filling in the box near the top right of our homepage or leave comments, as well as in providing raw data from which we can extract annual visitor numbers. Perhaps in one hundred years’ time, historians of the future will use these books to find out about museum visitors of the early twenty-first century? After all, what we did on last year’s Just Visiting thread was not all that different. Its focus, though, was on visitors to Bethlem Hospital in the last half of the nineteenth century, and early part of the twentieth.

In using the Hospital’s Visitors’ Books of that period for this purpose, we encountered an intriguing fact. While many of the people who visited the Hospital signed the book, others – unaccountably – didn’t. The result is that, while the Visitors’ Books can – and have – been mined for information concerning who visited, the absence of a name is not proof conclusive that no visit was paid. Sometimes we know, or may fairly assume, from other sources that a person whose name does not appear in the books did actually make a visit: Charlotte Brontë, for instance. Yet she was not the only one.

Two German cases illustrate the point. The Frankfurt psychiatrist, children’s author and civic dignitary, Heinrich Hoffmann (1809-1894) visited Bethlem in June 1856. Thirty years earlier – in April 1827, to be precise – the Paris-based poet Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) also paid a visit. This much can be established from published sources: Hoffmann’s autobiography, and Fritz Mende’s biography of Heine (citing a letter of his), respectively. Hoffmann duly wrote in Bethlem’s Visitors’ Book; but – frustratingly, and for reasons unknown to us – Heine didn’t. Consequently, when Frankfurt’s Historisches Museum mounted an exhibition in commemoration of the bicentenary of Hoffmann’s birth, a facsimile of the page of the book on which he signed was included in it. By contrast, there was no paper trail for the compilers of the final volume of the modern, German-language edition of Heine’s works (currently in preparation) to follow.

All of this goes to show that signing the book was something that people opted into (or opted out of) back then, as indeed it is now for visitors to the Archives & Museum. No doubt there have always been some for whom the merits of anonymity trump the claims of posterity.

Oxford Martyr 3

We hope we may be permitted to add a postscript to our reviews of recently-published books concerning Edward Oxford, in order to give context to the claim that Oxford was (for a time, at least) a martyr to British public opinion, which had been outraged by his intended attack (whether in seriousness or in pretence) upon the person of the Queen. Were it not for the success of the insanity plea advanced by his defence counsel, Oxford surely would have been sent to the gallows, despite serious doubts being entertained concerning whether his pistols were loaded. Yet his incarceration at Bethlem and then at Broadmoor could have quite easily been lifelong: once he admitted to a visitor that, though he dreamt of being released, he knew it wasn’t very likely.¹

A paper just published by Dr Tom Davies in the National Library of Wales Journal treats the medical evidence preserved in the records of the Welsh Court of Great Sessions as illustrative of the range of ways in which so-called ‘criminal lunatics’ were handled in eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain. Davies gives the example of a 1734 homicide on the Gower Peninsula against whom no prosecution was pursued due to ‘insanity’,² and he speculates that in cases such as these, some “would have been released” and left “to fend for themselves, permanently psychologically scarred as they were”, while for others “arrangements were made for some type of custodial care”, with an eye more to “the protection of the community” than to “the welfare of those being detained”. In eighteenth century Wales, these arrangements ranged from being “kept in close custody for life”, through being sent to Ireland, there to be “detained in some safe and proper place of confinement”, or being transported to the colonies as a convict, to being attended by “proper persons…to administer medicines or such remedies as shall be thought necessary to restore [the] reason”.³ ‘Confinement’ in this context usually meant confinement to prison, but by the early nineteenth century another option was available: transfer to Bethlem’s Criminal Lunatic Department, opened on the Hospital’s new site in Southwark in 1816. Davies instances two Welsh admissions to this Department, though without naming them – Aaron Bywater, who was first charged in 1799 and held at Montgomery Gaol prior to 1816; and John Roberts, who was admitted to Bethlem in 1825 directly following his trial  – both acquitted of murder on the grounds of insanity, and both confined at His (later Her) Majesty’s Pleasure.⁴

‘Arrangements’ such as these were effectively life sentences. Oxford, though he had caused no actual harm and was considered by his doctors to be of sound mind, was extremely lucky to escape this fate. His case, like that of Daniel McNaughten, another resident of Bethlem’s Criminal Lunatic Department, became a cause célèbre and a lightning rod for public debate concerning the insanity defence. One school of thought, to which the Queen herself subscribed, was that the defence was being cynically exploited as an expedient to escape deserved punishment. In 1843 the inimitable Punch magazine placed within its pages a spoof advertisement for a ‘Monomaniac Academy’ at the Hospital:

“Messrs Oxford and Macnaughten beg to announce that they have opened an Academy for the instruction of youth in the art of insanity. This very desirable and necessary acquirement will enable persons who have committed any crime or offended against the law of their country to escape punishment…Young gentlemen who are studying the art of picking pockets will also find this a desirable addition to their education; as, should they be detected, and tried at the Old Bailey, two or three lessons will teach them how to become monomaniacs pro tempore. Terms – One Guinea per lesson.”⁵

In 1867, the Evening Standard considered Oxford’s release to be “merciful” and his banishment to the colonies to be “very proper”, opining that “it is very right that the person of the sovereign should be protected from the vanity of a man who, at however distant a period, could commit the cowardly outrage of which he was the perpetrator”.⁶ One gets the impression from the story of Oxford’s life that there were certain points at which events could have easily taken a different course, one that would have been far less auspicious for him.

In his paper, Davies makes one critically important point which is easily lost sight of in the midst of historical (as well as contemporary) discussions of mental health and criminal responsibility. “In spite of the adverse publicity which crimes committed by the mentally ill attract,” he reminds us, “they form only a small proportion of the whole criminal population”. Again, his examples are from Wales, where “from 1730 to 1830, 855 [people] were taken to court for murder”, but only “twelve were considered to be ‘insane’”, and from 1825 to 1846 there were “not more than six” mentally ill offenders of any kind “being kept in…gaols at any one time”.⁷ Davies’ point is well taken: according to Mind, the UK mental health charity, today’s crime statistics “do not support…sensationalised media coverage about the danger that people with mental health problems present to the community”. Further, “people with mental health problems are more dangerous to themselves than they are to others”, as well as being “more likely to be the victim of a violent crime than the perpetrator”.⁸

¹ Jenny Sinclair, A Walking Shadow: The Remarkable Double Life of Edward Oxford (Melbourne, 2012), p. 68.

² T. Davies, ‘A Kind of Medical Knowledge’ , National Library of Wales Journal, vol. XXXV, no. 4 (2013), p. 18.

³ibid., pp. 21, 25.

⁴ibid., p. 23.

⁵Punch, volume 4, January-June 1843, p. 132.

⁶Evening Standard, 27 November 1867.

⁷ T. Davies, ‘A Kind of Medical Knowledge’, National Library of Wales Journal, vol. XXXV, no. 4 (2013), pp. 17, 22.

⁸ Mind, ‘Dangerousness and mental health: the facts’, available online at www.mind.org.uk.

Hospital Snapshots 5

It is impossible to say with certainty why patients were photographed at Bethlem in the 1850s. Although documenting the ‘physiognomy of insanity’ may be one reason, building a body of evidence for the success of the new regime in the hospital may well have been another.

The Bethlem collection contains 6 pairs showing the same individual on admission and when convalescent. These ‘before and after’ shots might have been taken to allow doctors, and now us, to see the transformation that had taken place and evidence the claim of recovery. In all but one set, the patient is seated in the initial picture and standing when convalescing, perhaps conveying the idea of greater energy and purpose as they move towards recovery.

In the last set, this order is reversed. Harriet Jordan, a 24-year-old cloak and mantle maker, is standing in the first photograph but seated and occupied in the second. It is perhaps startling that there is only a matter of months between the two. When Harriet was suffering from mania, she had been quite agitated, ripping her clothes and being generally destructive. For her, recovery might be more appropriately seen in the tranquil and decorous pose of a Victorian lady at her sewing.

In the second photograph she appears to have looked up from her needlework, a not uncommon photographic device at the time. One hand holds the fabric in her lap, her elbow resting on the table holding her thread. Her hair, curled either side, accentuates its roundness and the light flattens it. Though she is looking to camera and has the beginning of a smile, both unusual in the conventions of the time, her gaze is a touch vacant and reveals little. Her face is not shown in close up and the viewer is separated from her by her skirts. Although she is not seated behind the table, its edge and the positioning of her arms, marks the mid-point and forms something of a barrier. The overall impression is of an ordered and respectable woman, meeting the social conventions of the time and keeping onlookers at a suitable distance.

Hospital Snapshots 4

The previous posts in this series have looked at the importance of photography in illustrating certain psychiatric conditions. Contemporaries noted the value of the photograph over other forms of illustration for the way it was able to pay close attention to detail and record minute points of expression; especially important when using the image for diagnostic purposes. It is perhaps therefore surprising that the Bethlem photographs show more than just a head and shoulders view where the face is only a small proportion of the whole. Long lenses were available at the time and could have given a closer shot of facial features.

Photographs were useful for reasons other than diagnosis¹ and, in the case of the photo below, it may have been the family relationship that it was thought important to document. This is the only double portrait in the Bethlem collection showing a father and son resident in the hospital at the same time. We might infer their relationship from their positioning, the son with a hand possibly on the back of the father’s chair. There appears no communication between them but perhaps the connection is made through the alignment of their heads and hands. Family history of mental illness was one of the standard questions asked on admission and this photograph might have been taken to provide visual evidence of this. They are dressed alike and we see the same view of their faces with their downcast eyes, set mouth and lowered chin and brows.

Thomas Bailey was 69 at the time this photograph was taken, his son John, 44. Both had been admitted to Bethlem suffering from melancholia. In Thomas’s case, the condition was triggered by the illness and subsequent death of his wife. John was admitted a month later: the stated cause, the death of his mother. Although their illness presented in different ways there were common features: both for example were reluctant to eat, and both appeared to have had something of a history of melancholia, having had previous hospital admissions.

There appeared to be some improvement in each case. Both earned their living as gardeners and, after a time, were persuaded to interest themselves in the gardens at Bethlem. Sadly though, neither case had a positive outcome. Thomas died at Bethlem and his son was discharged uncured.

¹ Hugh Welch Diamond, ‘On the Application of Photography to the Physiognomic and Mental Phenomena of Insanity, read before the Royal Society’, 22 May 1856