Rhythm is a Dancer: Psychology and Physiology of Dance

As we prepare to celebrate the New Year, we might wonder about the different uses of dance in modern and historical healthcare. In November, our Friends Secretary participated in an event at the Wellcome Collection, which explored the relation of dance to mental health and illness. The evening was part of the Rhythm is a Dancer event series, in which dance performances and discussions take place side by side, offering new perspectives on the physiology and psychology of dance. Two events are yet to take place, in January 2013 – keep an eye on the website for tickets, as they book out rapidly!

November’s event explored the way in which dance has been characterised as both illness and cure in the realm of mental health. From a historical perspective, both ideas often emerged side by side: asylum balls, thought to improve the quality of life and the self-control of the individual, existed alongside widespread concern over the wild movements and fits exhibited in diagnoses like hysteria. Art historian Nancy Ireson, for example, told the audience all about the life of Jane Avril, the French Can Can dancer made famous in the paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec. Jane was admitted to the famous Salpêtrière Hospital as a teenager, under the care of the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. Suffering from a movement disorder, she claimed that the hospital dances contributed to her cure: an idea picked up in contemporary healthcare by Sara Houston, a dance lecturer (and former dancer), researching the use of dance in Parkinson’s Disease.

Dance was certainly an important part of Victorian asylum life, as described in Charles Dickens’ article on the Christmas Ball at St Luke’s Hospital: A Curious Dance Round a Curious Tree. Yet conditions such as hysteria might also incorporate an element of performance within the symptoms exhibited by patients. Charcot claimed the disease had four distinct stages, which his star patients could produce on cue in weekly lectures. Thus, within nineteenth-century mental healthcare, dance could be represented as both curative (restoring the self-control thought to have been lost during madness) and pathological (representative of a neurological condition resulting in a failure to control impulses). Thus, throughout the event, it was made apparent that dance can function both as a form of freedom and a means of control: sometimes, perhaps, both at the same time.

Image copyright: Mike Massaro

Neurology, the “Unconscious” and Victorian Psychiatry

The copy of Theo Hyslop’s 1895 publication, Mental Physiology in the Wellcome Library was, presumably, originally the doctor’s own, as it is interleaved with reviews, calling cards and letters to Hyslop from other mental health professionals, forming a fascinating archive in itself.

Mental Physiology was written mainly for the psychological part of Hyslop’s London M.D, which he completed while working as Assistant Medical Officer at Bethlem. Hyslop’s successor, William Stoddart, found it “strange” that the book never reached a second edition.¹ Perhaps Hyslop’s efforts to associate somatic and psychological theories of mental health and illness did not integrate easily with a growing divide between neurological and psychotherapeutic approaches. Nonetheless, Mental Physiology certainly shares similar evolutionary concerns with much British psychiatry of the period, in emphasising the importance of volition (or will) to both the individual and broader civilization, simultaneously associating mental ill-health with a loss of, or failure to attain, this self-control.

Hyslop was also heavily influenced by French neurology, much of which stemmed from the work of Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière in Paris. Mental Physiology contains numerous references to the writings of Charcot’s pupils, such as Charles Féré and Pierre Janet. Janet is of particular note here: his calling card appears among the numerous psychiatrists’ cards pasted into this copy of Mental Physiology (from physicians across Europe and the United States), presumably received when they either visited Bethlem or attended a conference or meeting of the Medico-Psychological Association. A letter from Janet to Hyslop, also included in Mental Physiology, would seem to be part of a longer correspondence between the two, for it discusses the symptoms, and treatment, of a particular individual, presumably known to both parties. Since Henri Ellenberger’s research into The Discovery of the Unconscious in 1970, Janet’s work has been regarded as important in the formation ‘dynamic psychiatry’ and psychotherapeutic techniques, through his explorations into repressed memory, multiple personality and the connections between past events and present trauma.² It is interesting to see here evidence of an established link between French and English psychiatry during a period in which, according to the traditional historical view, continental ideas had limited influence in England.

1. Stoddart, W. H. B. 1933. “Obituary: Theophilus Bulkeley Hyslop, M.D., CM., M.R.C.P.E., F.R.S.E.”. Journal of Mental Science 79, no. 325: 424-426.

2. Ellenberger, H. 1970. The Discovery of the Unconscious: the History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. New York: Basic Books.

Hallucinations & Delusions 4: Louis Box & Jack the Ripper

Previously in this blog, we commented on the prevalence of delusions concerning Jack the Ripper expressed by late nineteenth century Bethlem patients. Here, we continue the story of Louis Box, admitted in 1891.

On examination by the medical officers the day after admission, Box “says that he does not think he is ‘Jack the Ripper’ now and that he was mistaken last night. The fact of it is, it is evident that everybody thinks he is Jack the Ripper, people sniff as he passes them in the street in a meaning manner, they also make sarcastic remarks about him saying ‘he appears pretty happy this morning’, ‘there he goes’ etc. Worse than this, detectives are on his back and conspire to annoy him into confessing. Lately he went to what he thought was a boarding house but what turned out to be some house in the pay of the police. The house was in the care of a Frenchman who turned out to be Charcot [the French neurologist well known for his experimental research into hysteria through hypnosis]. He knows he was Charcot as he heard him remark as he was going upstairs that he (Box) had found out who he was. In this house he was subjected to every kind of machination with a view of making him confess. Wires were in his bed and he received shocks; there were telephones in the room and a false back to the cupboard. He heard them discussing all his previous life. They used to imitate the falling of drops of blood and then watch the effect on him. They used to flash lights before him and shew him indecent pictures at all times discerning the effect on him. It is not improbable that Charcot hypnotised him to see if he had homicidal tendencies.”

It was not just the mass media and the public who expounded on the Ripper case: psychiatrists, including Bethlem’s George Savage, published in national and specialist papers. Box’s words incorporate many of these medical interests: research into the “criminal personality” and the “born criminal”, homicidal tendencies, and psychopathia sexualis; the use of hypnosis; the wide fame of Charcot, and physiological and psychological investigation and experimentation. It is hard not to feel sympathy for Box’s declaration that: “He gets so annoyed by these contrivances and by public opinion in the case that although he knows he has not performed any murders consciously, he thinks he may have unconsciously.” The unconscious mind was, after all, just what many of these investigative methods aimed to uncover.

Hallucinations & Delusions 3: Jack the Ripper & Victorian Society

“These are the times of Jack the Ripper.”

Elizabeth Bishop (admitted to Bethlem June 1895)

The Whitechapel murders of 1888 are of particular interest in relation to what responses tell us about late Victorian society. Popularly considered the first “modern” serial killer, mass media coverage of the Ripper case ensured that discussions of poverty, crime and “sexual danger” permeated Victorian society; from autumn 1888, the delusions of many Bethlem patients centred around the “Whitechapel murders.” What is particularly clear in the Bethlem casebooks is the way in which the Ripper “sensation” affected men and women differently. Male patients worried that they were suspected of being involved in the crimes, or even that they were accused of being “Jack the Ripper” himself, while female patients feared mutilation, regularly identifying themselves with the prostitute victims.

 This divide reflects that indicated in histories like Judith Walkowitz’s City of Dreadful Delight. The Bethlem casebooks also validate Walkowitz’s claims that the sexual fears raised by the murders continued well after the case itself: 1888 and 1889 may see a proliferation of Ripper delusions at Bethlem, but they continued at least until the end of the century, and possibly beyond. The articulate story of one patient in particular deserves further attention. Louis Box, a London writer, was 25 when he was admitted to Bethlem suffering from mania. Although Box, like other male patients, identified with the murderer rather than the victims, he also claimed that he had “dressed as a woman and so committed the murders in Whitechapel,” an interesting subversion of gender roles.

Admission Register, showing Louis Box’s admission to Bethlem. To view more nineteenth century admission registers, visit our online archive.