Collections on Tour

In the small space of the present Bethlem Museum, we can only display around five per cent of our nearly 1,000 artworks at any one time. Luckily, art from the Bethlem Collection is often requested by exhibitions elsewhere. The Richard Dadd and Louis Wain collections make frequent journeys en masse: this summer, our collection of Wain cats will be travelling to the Nicholson Museum and Gallery in Leek, Staffordshire. The exhibition runs from 26 June until 8 October 2012.

Meanwhile, Elise Warriner’s The Anger Within has travelled back across the Channel, this year to be displayed at the Museum Boerhaave in Leiden (Netherlands), in an exhibition opening next week (Friday 13 April) and running until September 9th. The striking image was painted as part of Elise’s degree show, “Welcome to my World”, which focused on her struggles with anorexia nervosa, an illness from which she later recovered. The painting forms part of the exhibition The Weighty Body, shown last year at the Museum Dr Guislain in Ghent. Themed around the history of fasting, the exhibition explores the multiple religious, medical, aesthetic and political meanings of the refusal of food throughout the centuries. The exhibition catalogue is written in Dutch, French and English and explores a variety of artworks and images relating to body size. Many of these can be found on the Museum Boerhaave website.

Finally, one of our paintings appears in central London, in the Wellcome Collection‘s new exhibition, Brains: The Mind as Matter (29 March – 17 June). Visitors to the exhibition will be able to see Allan Beveridge’s Me, Myself, I. The exhibition ”follows the long quest to manipulate and decipher the most unique and mysterious of human organs, whose secrets continue to confound and inspire”, asking us “not what brains do to us, but what we have done to brains.” It will explore ways in which we have measured and classified, mapped and modeled, treated and displayed this complex organ within anatomy, science and art. On Saturday April 14, visitors can come to our Richard Dadd exhibition at the Archives and Museum from 11am, before heading over to the Brain Jar special event at Wellcome from 2 – 6pm. This afternoon of events for adults includes a chance to practise brain surgery skills, witness trepanning and graduate from the school of phrenology!

A Former ‘Madhouse’: The Museum Boerhaave

Earlier this month, our Friends’ Secretary paid a short visit to Holland to attend biennial conference of the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health, on the topic ‘Body and Mind’. The weekend included a fascinating visit and guided tour of the Museum Boerhaave (the Dutch National Museum for the History of Science and Medicine) in Leiden. The building in which the museum is housed has a long and complicated history: built as a nunnery in the early 15th century, shortly before 1600 it became a ‘plague hospital and madhouse’ (not the most obvious combination from a modern viewpoint!). Still, as the museum’s collection illustrates, many connections have been made historically between physical and mental illness. During the seventeenth century, standard medical practices were based on humoral theory, in which mental illness (often regarded as due to an excess of black bile in the body) was generally treated by the same techniques as diseases like plague: for example bloodletting, purging and vomiting. The Boerhaave, like other medical collections, has numerous instruments for such practices.

Anatomy is also well-represented in the collection, and a late eighteenth century collection of skulls illustrates the way in which doctors of the time tried to learn about the mind by studying the physical body. One cabinet contains a collection of skulls prepared by Sebald Justinus Brugmans (1763 – 1819), Professor of Medicine at Leiden from 1795 (further indicating the fluid nature of boundaries in the period, Brugmans had previously been a Professor of Physics and Mathematics, and also of Botany). Brugmans’ teaching specimens include animals preserved in alcohol, used for comparative anatomy, as well as human and animal skulls. The image above shows one skull listed by Brugmans as “the skull of a maniac.” During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, it was thought by many that examining the skull could inform the physician about the brain and mental state of the individual. This idea informed anatomist Franz Joseph Gall’s system of phrenology, developed in 1796 and popular well into the nineteenth century. The Bethlem collection contains several phrenology heads (one of which is pictured below), designed to show the “organs” of the brain, which were supposed to correspond directly to human faculties such as capacity for language, affection or pride.

The Museum Boerhaave is currently under threat of closure, with a major fundraising campaign to raise 700,000 Euros by the end of 2011 underway. To find out more, visit Save Museum Boerhaave. As previously mentioned on this blog, the exhibition ‘The Weighty Body (previously at the Museum Dr Guislain), which includes Elise Warriner’s The Anger Within from the Bethlem Art Collection, will open at the Boerhaave in 2012.

Dangerously Young: Child and Adolescent Psychiatry from a Historical Perspective

Staff from the Archives and Museum recently attended the 3^rd International Conference on the History and Heritage of Psychiatry, which was held at the Museum Dr Guislain in Ghent on the 28^th and 29^th April.

The theme of the conference was Dangerously Young: Child and Adolescent Psychiatry from a Historical Perspective. Bethlem’s archives were featured in two papers: Colin Gale and Caroline Smith examined the cases of several child and adolescent patients treated at Bethlem in the nineteenth century and Zbigniew Kotowicz of the University of Lisbon drew upon his extensive research in the Bethlem archives to examine the development of child psychiatry. Surprisingly few children were treated at Bethlem; of the 1069 patients under the age of 21 admitted between 1815 and 1899 only 58 were 15 or under.

The Belgian perspective was provided by a number of high-profile speakers, including the Flemish Commissioner for the Rights of Children. Belgium has relatively high levels of teen suicide, children in prison, child abuse and domestic violence (shockingly it is statistically more dangerous to be a Belgian woman than a Belgian soldier) and several papers explored the connection between child abuse and delinquency.

The role of DSM (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) in the ever-increasing number of mental disorders being diagnosed in children was a recurring theme, and Lisa Appignanesi (Chair of the Freud Museum) questioned how far an attempt is being made to medicalise ordinary emotions such as sadness, shyness and anxiety in order to benefit the drug companies.

Overall this was a thought-provoking conference and an excellent opportunity to meet representatives from museums of psychiatry throughout Europe. There was also a chance to pay a visit to one of Bethlem’s paintings: The Anger Within by Elise Warriner, on loan to the Museum Dr Guislain as part of their exhibition The Weighty Body: Fat or Thin, Vanity or Insanity. The exhibition explores the history of fasting, including those who stopped eating for religious or political reasons, and includes several works on the theme of anorexia nervosa. The exhibition has now closed but is due to be reprised at the Museum Boerhaave in Leiden in 2012.