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

Just Visiting: Henry Morley

If Charlotte Brontë did visit Bethlem, as she anticipated, in 1853, what would she have seen there? It is impossible to say for certain, since no account of her visit survives. But a sense of the Hospital’s environs is given in an account written just four years later by a lesser literary figure of the Victorian era, Henry Morley.

In 1857 Morley was commissioned by his friend Charles Dickens to write an account of a visit to Bethlem for Household Words, Dickens himself having reported on a visit to Bethlem’s rival St Luke’s Hospital in 1852. Morley’s account is of an institution transformed in the early 1850s by the appointment of Bethlem’s first Resident Physician.

“We went over the hospital a week or two ago,” he wrote. “Within the entrance gates, as we went round the lawn towards the building, glancing aside, we saw several groups of patients quietly sunning themselves in the garden, some playing on a grass-plot with two or three happy little children. We found afterwards that these were the children of the Resident Physician and Superintendent, Dr. Hood. They are trusted freely among the patients, and the patients take great pleasure in their presence among them. The sufferers feel that surely they are not cut off from fellowship with man, not objects of a harsh distrust, when even little children come to play with them, and prattle confidently in their ears. There are no chains nor strait waistcoats now in Bethlehem; yet, upon the staircase of a ward occupied by men the greater number of whom would, in the old time, have been beheld by strong-nerved adults with a shudder, there stood a noble little boy, another fragment of the Resident Physician’s family, with a bright smile upon his face, who looked like an embodiment of the good spirit that had found its way into the hospital, and chased out all the gloom.”

Morley’s conclusion, after a review of Bethlem’s chequered history? That “thousands of middle class homes contain nothing so pretty as a ward in Bedlam” and that “as to all the small comforts of life, patients in Bethlehem are as much at liberty to make provision for themselves as they would be at home”.¹

1 H Morley, ‘The Star of Bethlehem’, Household Words, 15 August 1857.

Henry Morley, c. 1888

His Powers of Walking III

Author and guest blogger Aislinn Hunter continues on from an earlier post.

The walk from Witley to Aldworth was, if our real-life Cowtan went directly, probably about six and a half miles or thirteen miles round trip. Depending on the route and Cowtan’s intentions this could easily have been a much longer trek. Add Cowtan’s age to that and it seems his belief in his great powers of walking were justified. As to his intentions we can only guess. Did Cowtan happen upon Aldworth or did he go there knowing it was the home of one of the era’s greatest poets? Cowtan, as previously mentioned, was a British Museum librarian and author who wrote a number of books on the Museum and its people (‘Memories of the British Museum’ and ‘A Biographical Sketch of Sir Anthony Panizzi’) before his admission to Bethlem. He was also the author of ‘The Autobiography of a “Man of Kent”’ a first-hand account of his life from 1817-1865; an account that references Tennyson twice – a sure sign that Tennyson and his work were on Cowtan’s radar.

What amazes me most about Cowtan’s casebook records is the very hazy line between statements of potential fact and ones of potential fiction. One of the signs of Cowtan’s dissociated state is that he claims to have been personally acquainted with the Queen – a completely incredulous idea if one presumes they are reading the casebook of an ordinary citizen – but one not as far-fetched when we discover that Cowtan was very well acquainted with a Mr Williams who was the ‘Librarian in Ordinary to Her Majesty Queen Victoria’ – a man he describes (in ‘Memories of the British Museum’) handling the precious volumes in the Royal Library – a description that places Cowtan there. Indeed, the records that do come up around Cowtan when one starts digging show him to have been a regular correspondent with dozens of important figures in the day (including Charles Dickens who was a ‘subscriber’ of Cowtan’s autobiography and who wrote to Cowtan at least once in 1867). A good number of these correspondences might have been related to Cowtan’s work at the library, or they may have been related to what appears to be a penchant for autographs – regardless, the letters demonstrate that Cowtan had access to, and interactions with, literary and societal circles that wielded significant influence in his day. This is not to say that Cowtan didn’t have a breakdown or suffer profoundly from the overwork his casebook describes, it’s simply to say that his story, like all patient’s stories, is far more nuanced than it might first appear.

I have always been obsessed with lost histories. It is one of the reasons I write and a theme that runs through my first five books and my current novel-in-progress. In finding Robert Cowtan I felt like I enacted what my fictional archivist Jane is seeking to do: give the dead back their stories. That afternoon ten weeks ago in the small back room of Bethlem’s archives was a pivotal one for me as a writer and as a human being. I felt in a small way like I’d re-tied a rope or knit some of the strands of one man’s life back together. A small thing perhaps, but part of what I, as a writer, hope to do: create resonance, take what those who came before us have done, and who they’ve been, and stitch some evidence of their lives back into the larger human story.

Aislinn Hunter is the author of two books of poetry, two works of fiction and a book of lyric essays. Her first novel Stay is due to begin filming in Ireland in the spring. A novel entitled And Then It Will Be Us is nearing completion.