From Melancholia to Prozac: Depression throughout History

As the new Bethlem Museum of the Mind will reflect on, Bethlem – or Bedlam – continues to loom large in the public imagination, often as a lens through which ideas about mental health care and treatment are cast. That this is the case for researchers as well as journalists is aptly illustrated in a recent book by Clark Lawlor, From Melancholia to Prozac.

Lawlor refers several times to the “enduring” image of public visiting to eighteenth-century Bethlem, which he describes as “a combination of prison and freak show”.¹ He uses this to contrast with nineteenth-century claims to offer “moral treatment” (as, indeed, asylum reformers did in the 1830s and ‘40s). Both ideas he seems to accept at face value, something that we at the Archives and Museum certainly remain wary of: championing or demonising the past can easily serve modern agendas.

Indeed, the main problem with Lawlor’s book is a frequent lack of critical historical thinking. As part of a project to explore depression before this modern label was applied, Lawlor retrospectively diagnoses various historical conditions as equating with modern depression. Many historians of psychiatry would argue against viewing clinical depression as the same as melancholia, hypochondriasis or neurasthenia (all terms used in the past to describe conditions that had some association with low mood). This is not to say that any of these states of illness are somehow imaginary: simply that prevailing cultural and medical concerns impact on not only the ways in which they are described, but also how they are experienced.

One particular example offered by Lawlor, acedia, is a case in point. When medieval monks were suffering from this condition, the low mood and lethargy they descibed might well be described as depression today. However, this was certainly not the most important component of acedia to these monks: most prominent was the loss of spiritual and religious feeling, something which had previously dominated every activity of their daily lives in an isolated monastery. Even the most devout person in the modern world is unlikely to put such an all-encompassing emphasis on spiritual connection today, and therefore cannot experience its loss in the same way that a thirteenth-century monk would have done.

Back to Bethlem, and Lawlor reproduces an image of Cibber’s famous statues, using them to claim the physiognomic emphasis on diagnosing depression in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Yet, on viewing the original statues, school groups at the museum frequently comment that “Melancholy Madness” doesn’t look sad to them. Might different facial expressions have meant different things to people around 1700? Might they have associated other emotional experiences than sadness with melancholy, such as the fear highlighted in the Carnival of Emotions? We certainly cannot be certain that clinical depression is the culmination of one universal story of understanding extreme misery.

---

1 Clark Lawlor, From Melancholia to Prozac (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 80

Sketch of a woman diagnosed as suffering from melancholia.

Lithograph, 1892, after a drawing made for Sir Alexander Morison (Wellcome Library, London).

Chance Encounters in the Museum 4

Here we resume a series of posts detailing some of the unanticipated intersections of interest that museum visitors bring to our notice from time to time. Regular readers may recall that the first in the series concerned a scholar who came a considerable distance solely to see Cauis Gabriel Cibber’s statues of ‘Raving and Melancholy Madness’. Many others have beaten a path to our door for the same reason, among them Nicholas Roe, Professor of English at the University of St Andrews. His new biography of John Keats is published this month by Yale University Press.

The publisher’s blurb states that “Roe is the first biographer to provide a full and fresh account of Keats’ childhood in the City of London and how it shaped the would-be poet”, and that “the mysterious early death of Keats’ father, his mother’s too-swift remarriage, living in the shadow of the notorious madhouse Bedlam – all these affected Keats far more than has been previously understood”. Readers of the biography will discover that Professor Roe locates the intersection between the life of the poet and the life of the Hospital precisely at the foot of Cibber’s statues, in the shadow of which Keats spent his childhood, and which (according to Roe) “lingered deep in his memory as gigantic embodiments of anguish, awaiting their summons to reappear as the fallen Titans in Hyperion”.¹

 “Instead of thrones, hard flint they sat upon,
Couches of rugged stone, and slaty ridge
Stubborn’d with iron.
…

Dungeon’d in opaque element, to keep
Their clenched teeth still clench’d, and all their limbs
Lock’d up like veins of metal, crampt and screw’d;
Without a motion, save of their big hearts,
Heaving in pain, and horribly convulsed…”²

Those who are captivated by Cibber’s statues will be interested to know that our Archivist is delivering a public lecture about them at St Bartholomew’s Hospital Pathology Museum on the evening of Wednesday 14 November (the talk is sold out, but demand has been such that we aim to offer a similar session in our Saturday lecture series for 2013); and those who are equally captivated by Keats may visit the Facebook page for the new book.

¹ Nicholas Roe, John Keats. A New Life (Yale University Press, 2012), p. 16.

² ibid., p. 273.

Windows Onto the Past IV

Stained glass windows were the starting point of the first two posts in this sequence, and a woodcut the springboard of the third. This time we feature a monument carved in stone in the seventeenth century by the Flemish sculptor Artus Quellinus the Elder – metaphorically as much a window onto early modern attitudes to ‘madness’ as the stained glass was onto medieval. Frenzy depicts a woman disrobed and tearing at her hair in evident mental torment. The trope of disordered hair (to represent the disordered mind) is employed to unsettling effect here as elsewhere – depictions of Matilda of Cologne and Crazy Jane spring to mind in this connection.

Now in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, the original setting of Frenzy was the courtyard of the city’s lunatic asylum. Faces stare out from the plinth upon which the woman writhes, each “with a pleading yet futile expression [as if] determined to see and be seen while at the same time realising that any thoughts of escape are useless”, according to the art historian Richard Cork. Presumably it functioned to advertise the role of the asylum in much the same way as did Cauis Gabriel Cibber’s statues of Raving and Melancholy Madness for London’s Bethlem Hospital from 1676 to 1815. But was it intended as a stigmatising image? Richard Cork thinks not. Whilst certainly “forthright”, it may perhaps have been intended “to arouse compassion for the plight of this possessed woman” and, by extension, that of the insane in general.¹

A comparison is worth drawing between Frenzy and another work attributed to Cibber, Dementia, which was sold to a private buyer at auction in 2008. Rather than portraying the illness we commonly associate with old age, Dementia seems to represent a middle-life trauma involving child neglect and alcoholism. It shares with ‘Raving’ and ‘Melancholy’ a stark realism that belies caricature. “How could anyone laugh at their suffering, when Cibber had gone out of his way to avoid all semblance of absurdity?”²

1 Richard Cork, The Healing Presence of Art (Yale University Press, 2012), p. 149.

2 ibid., p. 153.

Romancing the Stone

Last year we highlighted an opportunity for those with UK subscription television services to see Caius Gabriel Cibber’s statues of ‘Raving and Melancholy Madness’ on the small screen. These larger than life figures, which reclined on the gateposts of Bethlem Hospital from 1676 to 1815 and are now on display in the Archives and Museum, have since been featured on the British Museum’s History of the World project website.

Now they are to appear on BBC 4’s three-part documentary ‘Romancing the Stone: The Golden Age of British Sculpture’ . We are reliably informed that viewers will catch a glimpse of the statues in the first episode, scheduled for broadcast at 9pm today, Wednesday, 9 February, and an extended treatment in the episode to follow. All those with access to Freeview, take note!