Biography and Psychology IV: Daniel Hack Tuke (1827 – 1895)

Daniel Hack Tuke was a major figure at Bethlem in the late nineteenth century, and well-known within the field of psychiatry. Today he is often over-looked, perhaps due to his self-acknowledged role as a compiler of information, rather than an innovator: his contemporaries saw him as “a sort of scientific sponge”: “the cool-eyed observer of nature, and not the far-seeing prophet.”¹ One of his major works in this vein was his enormous two-volume compendium A Dictionary of Psychological Medicine, which included articles by many of the leading psychiatrists, psychologists and neurologists of the day, including Jean-Marie Charcot, Hippolyte Bernheim andVictor Horsley.

Tuke was the great-grandson of Samuel Tuke, the Quaker founder of the York Retreat, famous for his role in encouraging the humanitarian treatment of the mentally ill. The Tukes recommended “moral treatment” – the use of education and occupation in asylums, rather than whips, chains and the dramatic bleedings and purgings recommended by some eighteenth century doctors. Bethlem, as previous posts have acknowledged, was heavily influenced by these ideas throughout the second half of the nineteenth century.

Tuke first became involved with Bethlem in the 1870s, and was a trustee until his death, regularly attending meetings and walking the wards – his name can often be found mentioned in anecdotes in the patient casebooks. He was a close colleague of George Savage, superintendent from 1878 – 88: the two were joint editors of the Journal of Mental Science (now The British Journal of Psychiatry) for some sixteen years, and Savage wrote more articles for Tuke’s Dictionary than any author other than Tuke himself. Tuke shared Savage’s commitment to the importance of personal relationships between psychiatrists and asylum patients, as reflected in an obituary in Under the Dome written by Bethlem patient Henry Francis Harding. Harding’s obituary is a stark contrast to the medical obituaries found in the Journal of Mental Science, The Lancet and the British Medical Journal, concentrating on his family life and relationships rather than his medical achievements (although the latter articles do refer much to Tuke’s apparently “sentimental” nature).² He wrote:

The early death of his eldest son, who was a brilliant student of University College Hospital, was a painful blow to Dr. Tuke, but no doubt he found some amount of solace under this loss in the successful career as a painter of his other son, Mr. H.S. Tuke. [Henry Scott Tuke] The latter has been a foremost member of the Newlyn School, and like most of his brother artists of that school of painters, has lived a good deal on his boat on the coast of Cornwall, and, we remember, that about three seasons since, Dr. Tuke, upon his first visit to the Hospital, after his autumn holiday, said to the present writer that he had much enjoyed it, having in good part spent it with his son upon the latter’s studio-boat.³

Henry Scott Tuke, best known for his Impressionistic paintings of male nudes, was a highly successful artist in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, more recently becoming a cult figure in gay cultural circles. Although he was involved in what were then often termed “Uranian” circles, judging by the anecdote above Henry enjoyed a close relationship with his father. Looking at the personal and familial life of nineteenth century psychiatrists, then, can sometimes indicate that the definite and moralistic statements of contemporary published works (Tuke’s Dictionary, for example, includes a piece by Conolly Norman about homosexuality entitled “Sexual Perversion”) were not necessarily adhered to throughout their daily lives – or even, necessarily, in asylum practice.

¹ Rollin, H. “Daniel,Hack – Obituary” The Lancet, vol. 145 (1895): 718-20

² Harding, H.F. “Daniel Hack Tuke, M.D., F.R.C.P., LL.D.” Under the Dome, vol. 4, no. 14 (June 1895)

³ Rollin, op. cit.

Image copyright of the Wellcome Library, London

Letter to America 2

Continuing this earlier post.

The address given by Dr Weir Mitchell to the American Medico-Psychological Association, which was the occasion of Dr John Batty Tuke writing to him in 1894, was one of censure and admonition of his asylum doctor audience:

The whole asylum system is, in my opinion, wrong, and has been let to harden into organized shapes which are difficult to reform…

There should, I think, be in America somewhere one large, perfected hospital for the possibly curable insane, and it should of need, include a home for the education and uplifting of the chronic and hopelessly insane…

There [should be] no bars, no locked doors. … I see you smile. It has been tried, I believe, and has not been found impossible.

(The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, vol . 21, no. 7 (July 1894), pp. 432-434.)

Reading this address prompted Dr Tuke to (somewhat fawning) agreement and self-exculpation:

Reform is needed here as well as with you. As Hospitals our Asylums are useless. Let me remind you that twenty-five years ago I abolished all locks and keys in the County Asylum of which I was then Superintendent…

I shall send you soon a copy … of my evidence given before the London County Council, advocating the erection and maintenance of a Curative Hospital. It is Hospitals we want…

I may add that I have been well nigh ostracized by the Mad-Doctors in Great Britain.

Dr Tuke’s letter to America puts us in mind of earlier efforts made by others, including his namesake Daniel Hack Tuke, to familiarize themselves with best (and worst) asylum practice of continental Europe (efforts which have been the subject of previous comment, and are documented here). The sentiments shared by Mitchell and Tuke also find echoes in the establishment by London County Council of a pathological research laboratory at Claybury Hospital in 1895, and the joint efforts of Drs Frederick Mott (the laboratory’s director) and Henry Maudsley to establish a LCC hospital for early inpatient and outpatient treatment of acute mental disorder. Mott and Maudsley’s proposals, oulined in a document held here at the Archives & Museum (and pictured below), were at length successful, but that’s another story…

Letter to America 1

In the course of  research recently carried out at the Library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia (kindly supported by the College’s Francis Clark Wood Institute for the History of Medicine and the International Affairs Working Group of the Archives and Records Association UK and Ireland), our Archivist stumbled upon a letter written to Dr Silas Weir Mitchell of Philadelphia (pictured below) by Dr John Batty Tuke of Edinburgh.

To historians of medicine, Mitchell’s name will forever be associated with the ‘rest cure’ he devised for and practised on cases of so-called ‘hysteria’ in women and (some) men in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. His was a managed regime of seclusion, bed rest, diet, massage and faradization.  Tuke was a name to be conjured with in the world of Victorian asylumdom, Drs Samuel and Daniel Hack Tuke having been associated with the pioneering efforts of the Retreat near York. The exact familial relationship of John Batty Tuke to these remains unknown, but he was an eminent personage in his own right, sometime Superintendent of Fife and Kinross Asylum, President of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, and Member of Parliament.

Tuke’s letter to Mitchell is dated July 19, 1894, and commences:

Whilst reading your paper in Brain – the address to the American Medico-Psychological Association – I wondered whether you had ever seen two papers by me on the same subject.

Mitchell’s address, given on 16 May 1894, was published in volume 21 of The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease (not, as Tuke wrote, in Brain). Its purpose was, inter alia, to bemoan the isolation of psychiatry from general medicine, the custodial treatment to which asylum patients were routinely subjected, and the paucity of psychiatric research in both state and private institutions.

To be continued…

Photo of Dr Weir Mitchell courtesy of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia

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.