Curatorial Conversations IV

We are grateful to those who have so far joined the conversation about what and how museums of psychiatry ought to collect, preserve and display, and for coming out so strongly in defence of the museum’s mission. Readers may rest assured: there is no threat of destruction or dispersal hanging over our museum holdings. Yet Colborne and MacKinnon’s Exhibiting Madness in Museums, which we have been reading and responding to as if to a conversation partner, draws attention to artefacts of particular sensitivity within historic psychiatric collections.

What do these arguably ‘odd’ collections of mouth gags, wrist and ankle shackles, bowls, jackets, sporting equipment, locks and keys, and medicine bottles mean? What is their purpose?¹

Last year, some of the eighteenth century restraint devices held here at Bethlem were featured in the BBC’s History of the World website. As we noted at the time, the Victorian-era Hospital ‘retained what it had come to regard as the “revolting instruments of mechanical coercion” as material evidence both of its history and of its progress’, and today ‘these objects remind of the ongoing debate concerning involuntary detention, seclusion and chemical restraint’.

Coleborne and MacKinnon report that ‘touching, holding and viewing [such] objects…has had a therapeutic value for some’, whereas for others they ‘symbolise fear, serving as reminders of past experiences of brutal and lonely institutional spaces’.² Nurin Veis, curator at Museum Victoria, adds that audiences for medical exhibitions can display a ‘a fascination with the unknown, the hidden, and at times, the forbidden’ and are easily ‘captivated by the gothic theatricality evoked by displays of medical artefacts’ and provoked into ‘dramatic experiences of high emotion – ranging from moments of pain and revulsion, recognition of stigma, as well as personal insight’.³

Here at the Archives & Museum we do not think it would be right to use our collections for the purpose of manufacturing such experiences. We know that there are a wide range of possible reactions to these kind of displays. We do not wish to shepherd the responses of our visitors, but we do want to provide the information people need to understand the historical, medical and social context of the artefacts we have on display, and to reflect upon their contemporary significance.

^1. Catherine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon, Exhibiting Madness in Museums: Remembering Psychiatry through Collections and Display (Routledge, 2011), page 20.

^2. ibid.

^3. Nurin Veis, ‘The Ethics of Exhibiting Psychaitric Materials’, in Catherine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon, Exhibiting Madness in Museums: Remembering Psychiatry through Collections and Display (Routledge, 2011), page 48.

Curatorial Conversations III

[continued from an earlier post]

The American Journal of Bioethics recently devoted an entire issue to a range of responses to the ‘plastinated’ body shows of Gunther von Hagens, from attempts to justify them in terms of their perceived educational value through to their condemnation as an affront to human dignity: ‘human death and memory merit treatment of a sort that is fundamentally violated by Von Hagens’ plastination project’.¹ On the blogosphere, campaigners have taken matters further, pressing their case in the starkest of terms and urging exhibition boycotts.

Coming to a museum near you! Katrina Victims’ Bodies on Display! Twenty African, African-American, unclaimed and unknown victims of this hurricane tragedy are artistically dissected and posed in lifelike educational exhibits…This exhibit does not exist, thankfully, not because there aren’t unclaimed victims of Katrina…[but] because of the staggering outcry an exhibition like this would bring…

How about twenty dissected and unclaimed Jews? How would you feel? How about twenty Chinese? Wait. Twenty Chinese? Twenty Chinese on display without their consent. Where’s the outrage? Bodies: the Exhibition, opening February 1, 2008 at Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal, is just such an exhibition. Preserved and dissected Chinese bodies are being put on display without their consent.

If you died today, would you volunteer to be stripped of your skin, pumped up with liquid plastic, cut up, and posed in a museum display? Maybe, yes, maybe no. But at least that would be your choice… If you donated your body to science, would you expect it to be seen at a casino?… Travelling exhibitions like this are big business in the same tradition as carnivals and freak-shows of the 19th century… Museums with higher ethical standards will not allow exhibits such as this.²

For evidence that the specific issue raised in Coleborne and MacKinnon’s Exhibiting Madness in Museums about psychiatric patients’ bodies is a live one, one need look no further than recent media speculation concerning the contents of the New Churchyard near Bethlem. As we pointed out earlier this year, this speculation was unsupported by any reliable estimates concerning Bethlem’s patient population or mortality rate, or by any evidence that the Hospital’s pauper patients were more likely to be buried in this churchyard than other London paupers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the light of this, we are entitled to ask: What, then, fuelled this speculation?

This specific issue is not one with which we have had to deal directly at the Archives & Museum. Ours is not that kind of collection. Our general position, however, is this: our current efforts and our future planning are aimed at challenging interest in our collections that is merely prurient, and the concept of a freak-show is frankly abhorrent to us. We are committed to keeping the human dignity of patients, past and present, at the heart of everything we do.

1 Anita L. Allen, ‘No Dignity in Body Worlds: A Silent Minority Speaks’, The American Journal of Bioethics, vol. 7(4) (2007), page 24.

2 Morris Tai, ‘Bodies: the Exhibition in Cincinnati. Unethical. Bodies shown without consent of the dead’ [blog post], 28 January 2008, available online, partially cited in Gretchen Jennings and Maureen McConnell, ‘The Unexhibitable: A Conversation’, The Exhibitionist, vol. 27(2), Fall 2008, available online.

Curatorial Conversations II

We are grateful for the response received to the first of our posts in our series on Curatorial Conversations, which we hope will inform thinking and practice here at the Archives & Museum as we look toward our intended relocation.

With this series we hope to stimulate an ongoing discussion with as wide a range of our stakeholders as possible. Another of our ‘conversation partners’ is Coleborne and MacKinnon’s recently published Exhibiting Madness in Museums, which, as we mentioned in our previous post, raises a number of insistent questions about exhibitions on psychiatric history. Coleborne and MacKinnon’s work is most relevant to our concerns when it addresses the issue of how psychiatric collections may best be exhibited.

The limited number of psychiatric collections that have been open to the public have met a number of standard responses: large percentages of the viewing public decide to stay away from exhibitions that focus on mental health history; a voyeuristic proportion of the public simply want to gaze at the mad; and finally, former patients, family members, friends and staff, as well as some members of the general public, are interested in attempting to gain a clearer understanding of the experiences of patients and practitioners in psychiatric institutions.

The authors go on to touch upon the issue (hotly contested among museum professionals) of whether there may be some things that are simply unexhibitable.

Sensitive and compassionate exhibitions about specific institutions have found critical acclaim from sections of the viewing public… However, these successes have been complicated and far outweighed by the large proportion of the general public who voraciously consume the private, fee-entry, worldwide travelling collections, such as Gunther von Hagens’ plastination body part shows, as well as his live autopsy shows, some of which have made use of former psychiatric patients’ bodies.¹

[to be continued]

¹ Catherine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon, Exhibiting Madness in Museums: Remembering Psychiatry through Collections and Display (Routledge, 2011), pages 8-9.

Curatorial Conversations I

Long-time blog readers may remember the review we published exactly one year ago of Nell Leyshon’s play Bedlam, which premiered at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre last year. It is fair to say that the play attracted mixed reviews at the time. Here at the Archives & Museum, as we are beginning to turn our minds to the renewal and development of our display space that will accompany our intended relocation, we continue to mull over comments made in one of the most trenchant reviews of the play:

It is telling that Nell Leyshon’s script was researched in the company of medical professionals at the modern Bethlehem hospital. The way in which a transition from “archaic” to “modern” medicine is set up and handled, is so benign and uncomplicated that it could have come from a flyer she absent-mindedly picked up on the ward. The unproblematic figure of Dr Maynard, played as a clear-thinking moderniser by Phil Cheadle, struts his enlightened changes, his safe hands delivering us into the dawn of surveillance and incarceration as if it were simply liberation into a new professional era. That the confinement of the mentally disordered is again in vogue today, not just in Russia and China, but in the UK where successive decades of community-focused care are being reversed in an atmosphere of tabloid hysteria and the strengthening of pharmacological interests, seems to leave this play untroubled.

We are not in a position to say what may have been gleaned from medical professionals in the course of the research that underpinned this play, but certainly Archives & Museum staff did not use their own limited contact with those responsible for the play to encourage or endorse a straightforward evolutionary narrative in which past custodial horrors are simply contrasted with the enlightened psychiatric practice of the present.

The play has come and gone, of course, but the reviewer’s comments have stayed with us. The Archives & Museum has a long-standing commitment to recording the lives and experience, and celebrating the achievements, of people with mental health problems. It is anticipated that the relocation and renewal of its displays will bring closer the realisation of that aspiration. Yet contributors to a recently-published book on museums of psychiatry in Australasia, Canada and the UK, (called Exhibiting Madness in Museums) have challenged the very raison d’être of psychiatric collections in terms that are reminiscent of the reviewer’s criticism of the Bedlam play.

First, should such collections be maintained at all, given that (according to the book’s editors) ‘there are two violently opposed schools of thought: those that wish to preserve a form of history, and those who would be happy to see no trace left of the former psychiatric regimes, the buildings and landscape that housed them, as well as any artefacts that relate to these practices’? Are collectors and curators inevitably compromised by the very act of collecting and curating? In their attempts to ‘represent some past actors’, are they fated to ‘obfuscate and obliterate the voices of the majority…through processes of selection, omission and oversight’?¹

Second, who may be trusted to maintain, display and interpret such collections? Do the institutional affiliations of most psychiatric museums implicate them in a partisan ‘appropriation’ of mental health service users’ past by ‘medical and state bodies’? Is the construction of ‘a survivor-controlled museum of madness and the psychiatric system’ the only viable alternative?²

Third, and perhaps most importantly, how may psychiatric collections be exhibited most appropriately? What narrative will they be asked to sustain, if not a Whiggish one of uninterrupted progress and enlightenment? In an occasional series of blog posts called Curatorial Conversations, we will be addressing some of these questions from time to time, and asking our readers to contribute their comments as well. After all, answers to these questions will be required in time for the development of a new museum of the mind.

1 Catherine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon, Exhibiting Madness in Museums: Remembering Psychiatry through Collections and Display (Routledge, 2011), page 5.

2 ibid., page 6.