Biography and Psychology III: Walter Abraham Haigh

Walter Abraham Haigh was first admitted to Bethlem in October 1882. He was a tutor, who held a B.A. from Oxford University, and was 27 years old. He was diagnosed with Delusional Insanity and described as excited, and subject to fixed delusions and hallucinations, particularly of persecution. Victorian society was heavily class-based, and it may thus have been Haigh’s educated background that made his own explanations of his illness seem particularly interesting to his doctors: his casenotes are peppered with quotations, apparently reported verbatim.

Moreover, the extensive nature of the notes concerning Haigh suggests that he often conversed with the doctors, in addition to his usual asylum pursuits of playing the violin and chess. Haigh and superintendent, George Savage, certainly worked closely together. In March 1885, it was recorded that he “has during the last year rendered considerable assistance to Dr Savage in the production of his Manual of Insanity.” Indeed, Haigh is one of just two people acknowledged in the preface to Savage’s textbook: “W. Haigh, Esq., who has not only corrected my proofs, but has by criticism aided me much in the legal chapters.”

Without prior knowledge, it would be impossible to tell from Savage’s book that Haigh was one of Savage’s patients. Indeed, Haigh and Savage’s relationship serves to blur the distinction between doctor and patient entirely: it is Haigh who suggests his own treatment (the insertion of a seton in his neck – see image below for explanation of this treatment by “counter-irritation”), and the doctors quickly acquiesce. Moreover, despite continuing to admit to hallucinations and delusions often considered “dangerous” by Victorian psychiatrists, Haigh is given a free pass key to the asylum, although he is unwilling to leave the grounds, feeling suspicious of strangers.

Walter remained in touch with doctors at Bethlem after his discharge, regarded as well, in July 1888. He visited the Hospital over the Christmas of the same year, mentioning that he had been living in Dieppe as a tutor. The next year, he decided to go into the Church, and in 1890 took priest’s orders. Judging from his many letters, Haigh continued to suffer from the “hallucinations and illusions of contempt and persecution” that he had long complained of, but was nonetheless able to work and live outside the asylum (without, of course, the aid of medication), and does not appear to have been certified again, although he did return to Bethlem three times for a short stay as a voluntary boarder in the 1890s. “As to what my perversions of sensations are no “sane” person would have any idea.” He wrote in 1890, “But I do despise those who know I have been certified and who judge ignorantly.”

 

Image from Armamentarium Chirurgicum by Johannes Scultetus, c. 1655

Wellcome Library, London

Biography and Psychology II: George Savage (1842 – 1921)

Our recent post on biography in the history of psychology has inspired a new series, exploring the lives of certain individuals at Bethlem, beginning with late-nineteenth-century psychiatrist, George Savage.

Savage is little remembered today: he is most famous in the field of literature, having for a while attended Virginia Woolf. His lack of contribution towards any major theoretical approaches to mental illness, or shifts in diagnostic classification, make him often appear a minor figure in the history of psychiatry. Yet, for his case-based approach, Savage serves as an interesting example of the late Victorian asylum psychiatry and, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he thus held a prominent position in the field. Indeed, Savage appears to have been the only psychiatrist who appeared in Vanity Fair’s prestigious “Men of the Day” series (on his knighthood in 1912) and, on his death in 1921, was declared by The Times an “authority on insanity.”

George Henry Savage was born in Brighton in 1842, into a middle class family. He went into medicine, qualifying in 1865, with his first post being as House-Surgeon at Guy’s Hospital. However, after taking on a six-month post as “resident student” at the Bethlem Royal Hospital the following year, Savage later claimed that he “saw the possibility which might open as a life’s work.” After a period as a country GP, Savage returned to Bethlem as Assistant Medical Officer in 1872, later becoming Physician-Superintendent, before leaving in 1888 to embark on a successful career as a consultant psychiatrist, while remaining in regular contact with Bethlem, and on the board of governors until his death.

Savage was an active member of the Medico-Psychological Association (meetings of which were often held at Bethlem), served a term as President, and was co-editor of the Journal of Mental Science, the main psychiatric journal, from 1878 until 1894. Yet, this professional engagement should not blind us to the importance of seeing Savage, also, as an individual. He was not only well-known in the field of psychiatry, but also appears to have been popular in a broader swathe of contemporary urban bourgeois society, described by a friend after his death as “the most clubbable man I ever knew.” Savage’s membership of a huge number of dining and literary clubs attests to this. His contemporaries described him as a “big-brained vigorous-bodied man,” who “revelled in climbing crags, sport on the moors … and ski-ing over snow and icy roads.” As a follow-up post will indicate, seeing Savage as a person as well as a doctor reminds us that his relationship with his patients was often personal, as well as professional.

Caricature of Savage in Vanity Fair, 1912

Biography and its Place in the History of Psychology and Psychiatry

Biography has often been dismissed within academic circles, regarded as an unsophisticated approach to history. However, a recent one-day symposium at the UCL Centre for the History of Medicine begged to differ, and highlighted the importance of the topic in a field attempting to understand and explore the human mind. Indeed, biography can help us investigate the methods of these human sciences themselves, as Professor Daniel Todes indicated in a paper on the well-known experiments of Ivan Pavlov. For Todes, we cannot fully appreciate Pavlov’s methods in insolation from the man himself for, as Pavlov declared: “That which I see in dogs I immediately transfer to myself.”

More questions were raised by the day than answered. According to Dr Mathew Thomson, this is not an issue, but rather an important element of the biographical approach. Thomson suggested that biography is a way to challenge the very idea of a firm answer, and indicate the complexities of any historical topic. By way of example, he explored the volume of biographical essays on psychoanalyst David Eder, published after Eder’s death by a variety of contributors. What strikes Thomson is the sheer lack of biographical coherence in these essays, for, naturally, Eder meant very different things to different people. Moreover, for many of these contributors, psychoanalysis was not simply a method used by the analyst. Instead, it became regarded as something expressed in the personality and presence of the analyst himself, making biography vital to understanding its very nature.

One problem with biography, Dr Peter Hegarty suggested, is the struggle a writer has with determining what is appropriate: how should we write about other people’s lives? Such a question is many-sided, for it affects both the historian and his or her subject. Two papers approached this directly, exploring the use of biographical information in case histories, in the late nineteenth-century asylum in England and two early twentieth-century institutions for juvenile delinquency in Romania. Both indicated the way certain aspects of an individual’s history might be especially highlighted by researchers (in both history and psychiatry) in order to draw a particular conclusion. Yet, as this fascinating day constantly impressed on all who attended, many different conclusions might indeed be possible, and a psychiatric record only gives us one tiny facet of the very varied lives and experiences of individuals.

Visit the conference website, where it is hoped that abstracts of papers will soon be available.

Pavlov’s dogs with their keepers at the Physiology Department, Imperial Institute of Experimental Medicine, St Petersburg, 1904

Image courtesy of Wellcome Images

Victorian Psychiatrists: Theophilus Bulkeley Hyslop (1863 – 1933)

Theo Hyslop, or “T.B.” as he was familiarly known, was Assistant Medical Officer at Bethlem from 1888 – 1898, when he was promoted to Resident Physician and Medical Superintendent. He remained at Bethlem until 1911.

The young Theo was literally brought up to “lunacy,” as asylum work was often known at the time. When he was two years old, his father William purchased Stretton House asylum, a private asylum for male patients in Church Stretton, Shropshire, where the family also lived. In 1869, the asylum held 40 patients and, like nineteenth century Bethlem, many could enjoy cricket, gardening, billiards, and music, while the richer patients could ride or take ‘carriage exercise’. The grounds were spacious, and the asylum was supplied from its garden and model farm.

Following his early medical training, Hyslop first came to Bethlem at the age of 23, as a clinical assistant. These posts (the name of which changed frequently over the years, in an effort to attract more applicants) were unpaid, resident positions, designed to give qualified medical men first-hand experience in “psychological medicine.” Many of Bethlem’s clinical assistants later became prominent in the field: another such in the late nineteenth century was psychologist and anthropologist W.H.R. Rivers, well known for his treatment of Siegfried Sassoon during the First World War, who will be the subject of a future post.

Hyslop is a particularly interesting character, both from his long involvement with Bethlem, and his widespread interests in art, music, literature and sport, as well as medicine. His publications were extremely varied: he was interested in physiology, philosophy, religion, the common fin-de-siècle fear of “degeneration” and the possible connections between genius, art, creativity and insanity (The Great Abnormals, for example, aimed to show that “the wildest imaginings” were not incompatible with “the highest attainments in the realms of thought and conduct”). Although the variety of Hyslop’s pursuits makes for a fascinating retrospective, it may also indicate one reason as to why he has received little attention in later years: one obituary suggested that if he “had directed all his energies into a single channel, there is little doubt that he would have become a very great man indeed.”

Hyslop at work at Bethlem