Curatorial Conversations XIII

(continued from previous post)

Last month, we considered the application of the term “voyeurism” to museums of mental health. In further exploring this idea, it is interesting to note that the very term originated within the field of sexual psychopathology around the turn of the twentieth century, and is still attributed as a diagnosis in this context. This emphasises a presumed need for intervention (either directly or indirectly, by preventing access to pornographic and similar materials) to prevent behaviour deemed to be negative or unhealthy. Within the context of psychiatric visiting, the idea is most frequently associated by writers with the open doors of eighteenth-century Bethlem. Examples of the cruelty of some individual visitors in such circumstances are used to portray the very practice as essentially sadistic (another term popularised by Krafft-Ebing), ignoring the great diversity of experiences and motives for visiting, as well as issues later raised by the closing of institutional doors (including allegations of abuse).

Is voyeurism really a problem for today’s mental health museums? How would we even judge whether or not a person’s experiences of the collection were voyeuristic? As in the eighteenth century, the motivations for visiting psychiatric museums are extremely varied, ranging from personal and familial experience to social and political concerns or general interest. Indeed, fears over voyeurism might seem to conflict with the educational aims of many of these collections. A recent MA project at the University of Birmingham by Laura Humphreys found that lack of interest in fact appeared to be the biggest challenge for psychiatric museums, with a portion of the museum-going public not regarding such collections as relevant or interesting. If one aims (as the Bethlem Museum does) to contribute towards the destigmatisation of mental illness there is, after all, less point in preaching to the potentially converted (those with direct experience of mental health services by any means) than to the so-called “voyeurs” who may have a general interest but little knowledge of the realities of mental health experiences and treatment. Stigmatising such potential visitors as “voyeuristic” may be an elitist and potentially damaging attitude.

Curatorial Conversations XII

During last November’s panel discussion at UCL’s Petrie Museum, Chair Niall Boyce (Senior Editor of The Lancet) remarked on the potential for voyeurism in the display of images like those taken by Francis Galton at Bethlem in the 1880s. Similar concerns emerge frequently in discussion of psychiatric museums (and often medical museums in general): as Dolly MacKinnon and Catharine Coleborne recently put it, such collections are confronted with the problem that “a voyeuristic proportion of the public simply want to gaze at the mad.”1

But what is actually meant by “voyeurism” in such circumstances, and can any portion of visitors be so easily labelled and dismissed? Medical museums have long operated in relation to similar fears. When Henry Wellcome opened his Historical Medical Museum in Wigmore Street in 1913, visitors were carefully limited to “protect” the public: they thus mostly consisted of medical professionals and other educated, middle class (and usually male) visitors. This example clearly indicates the power relations inherent in claims of voyeurism (in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century often called “morbid curiosity”). Voyeurism was deemed to be a response exhibited by less educated individuals: a claim that offers worrying reflections on contemporary practice. The assumptions underlying such concerns may well lead to a “them” and “us” attitude. Archive and museum staff and academics thus assume that their own educational background ensures that they exhibit a “correct” response to psychiatric material (ignoring the fact that the potential for so-called voyeurism might equally exist within their own ranks), an idea used to support their privileged access, while denying it to those with a lower level of formal education.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, doctors frequently discussed the propriety of medical texts falling into the hands of lay readers: a fear particularly related to books on sexual matters. Reviews of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis – the huge expansion of which, mostly from readers’ letters, between the first edition in 1886 and the twelfth in 1903 made it abundantly clear that it was widely accessible – frequently suggested that the very existence of texts on sexual pathology generated and perpetuated such behaviour, by pandering to the unhealthy “morbid curiosity” of the public.

(to be continued)

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

Curatorial Conversations X

The point of departure for the article by David Wright and Nathan Flis that formed the basis of posts to this blog in February and March is the recent trend of reclamation and memorialisation of asylum cemeteries in countries such as Canada, Australia and the USA. At one level, they write, such cemetery projects ‘provide a necessary and dignified service…to clean up and properly designate graves’ and ‘provide a forum for collective action which provides meaning and helps define new patient advocacy groups’. At another level, ‘the new cemeteries afford an opportunity where survivors can “speak” to the dead’, as it were. In the words of a Canadian project volunteer, ‘By recovering these headstones we’re saying, “They will no longer be forgotten”’.¹

Wright and Flis go on to argue that both remembering and mis-remembering are inextricably linked in this process of memorialisation. First, they say, ‘the public…often misattributes the medical experimentation of the early to mid-twentieth century with the first two generations of the asylum in the nineteenth’. Second, a focus on asylum cemeteries brings the strictly singular but immensely powerful ‘cultural tropes’ of war and holocaust, displacement and victimisation, to bear upon the history of mental health treatment, and tends to obscure ‘the permeability of the mental hospital, one factor of which was the discharge of many patients back into the community where they largely disappeared from the public record’..²

Part of our work here at the Archives & Museum is to respond to genealogical enquiries. In doing so, we are conscious that patients who died while in hospital care are far more ‘visible’ to posterity than those who did not, for the simple reason that death certificates form one of the sources of information that is most readily accessible to the modern genealogist. Confining one’s attention to people who died at Bethlem might give rise to the unwitting impression that lifelong residence was the experience of the majority of its patients, an impression as erroneous for seventeenth and eighteenth-century practice as it would be for nineteenth and twentieth, to say nothing of twenty-first. We are keen that our Archives & Museum service does all it can to assist efforts at remembering, but we cannot be expected to support exercises in mis-remembering. The history of British mental health treatment is not an unvariegated chronicle of brutality and genocide.

¹ D. Wright and N. Flis, ‘A Grave Injustice: The Mental Hospital and Shifting Sites of Memory’, in Catherine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon, Exhibiting Madness in Museums: Remembering Psychiatry through Collections and Display (Routledge, 2011), pages 101 and 111.

² ibid, pp. 111-113.

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 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.