Mystical Bedlam: Museums at Night

Last Thursday, we opened up after hours for Museums at Night 2013. We managed to squeeze a record number of visitors into the small space to explore ‘mystical Bedlam’ in the late nineteenth century. This free talk focused on the late nineteenth-century interest in hypnotism (about which we have previously blogged) as well as the involvement of several psychiatrists associated with Bethlem and psychical research, including Daniel Hack Tuke, George Savage and Theo B. Hyslop.

In 1906, Hyslop published a ‘sort-of novel’ (in the words of his obituarist, and successor at Bethlem, W.H.B. Stoddart). Laputa, Revisited by Gulliver Redivivus, was a satire of the customs and habits of the early twentieth century, based on the return of Gulliver to Laputa and the changes that he found there since his previous visit. Although published anonymously, it may have been obvious to readers that the book was written by a psychiatrist, for a good third of the text takes place inside the Laputan asylum. Here, Gulliver attends a lecture entitled ‘The Moon v. Green Cheese’, in which Hyslop satirises most psychological approaches of the day. Scottish surgeon James Braid, for example (well-known for his work on hypnotism in the first half of the nineteenth century), becomes the ‘Past and Present Grand Master of Black and White Magicians’, while the Society for Psychical Research is characterised as the ‘Society for Psychical Spook-Spotters (British and Foreign)’.

It might be tempting to conclude from this that Hyslop found hypnotism and psychical research as a whole to be something of a joke. Yet the Laputan lecture is equally scathing about biological (evolutionary and determinist) approaches to mind. Indeed, when the lecture was first published in Bethlem’s Under the Dome in 1896 (as a talk from the ‘Bethlem Association for the Advancement of Science’), Hyslop was himself an Associate of the Society for Psychical Research, a position he maintained until at least 1901. He corresponded with French psychologist Pierre Janet, and published on ‘double consciousness’, in which he used examples of altered states that he had encountered at Bethlem. His connections also encouraged him to develop an open mind about symptoms of mental illness, such as hallucinations, which the Society for Psychical Research had discovered were more common among the ordinary population than had been previously assumed.

We hope at the Archives and Museum that a historical approach to mental health care can encourage critical thinking and enable complex issues to be thoughtfully addressed. At Museums at Night, we took the opportunity to ask people about the designs for the new Museum of the Mind, and got some detailed and extremely useful feedback. For online visitors, we’ll be repeating this process over the coming weeks with a series of short questionnaires focused around specific elements of the planned displays. All comments will be gratefully received, and help us to ensure that the new Bethlem Museum reflects the broadest possible range of interests and experiences.

To begin this process, we’d like to invite you to help to choose the logo for the new museum, from three designs suggested to us. To record your thoughts, click on the link below.

 Click here to take survey

Hypnosis at Bethlem

In January, our Friends Secretary went to Manchester to take part in the annual British Society for the History of Science Postgraduate Conference, as part of her PhD research. The event included a presentation on the BSHS education programme, during which several videos – the efforts of the Society’s “Strolling Players” – were screened. The most recent of these – “The Tables Turned” – evoked a few thoughts on late nineteenth century Bethlem.

The short film, part of an educational outreach event exploring scientific knowledge within a historical context, showed a nineteenth century séance, at which one character attempts to investigate the possible causes of the popular pastime of table turning. A number of recent historians of psychiatry have stressed the importance of the Victorian interest in spiritualism to the developing science of psychology in the nineteenth century, in particular attempts to define and understand the “unconscious” mind. While, today, research into psychical phenomena tends to be regarded a “pseudoscience”, it is important to recognise the impact that spiritualism had in the nineteenth century.

Certainly, physicians at Bethlem were interested in whether spiritualism might help in understanding and treating patients. Early experiments in hypnosis took place in 1883, in which superintendent George Savage tried unsuccessfully to be hypnotised himself, in order to understand what “honest hypnotism really was.” In the late 1880s and early 1890s, the Hospital received a number of visits from “Mr Smith of the Psychical Society,” otherwise known as the Society for Psychical Research, which had been set up in 1882 to investigate apparently psychical phenomena. Were these external events, connected with a spirit world, or were they being consciously or unconsciously performed by unscrupulous or gullible mediums? How could this account for the experiences of others involved in a séance? And what else could this suggest about the workings of the human mind?

At Bethlem, Mr Smith tried several experiments in hypnotising various patients, either in an attempt at cure or to alleviate particular symptoms from which the patient suffered. Most of these efforts were ultimately judged unsuccessful, nonetheless – as Bethlem superintendents frequently remarked – it was important to try every possible new treatment for insanity, and the “method … is reported to have met with considerable success abroad.”

To watch “The Tables Turned” visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjBl3HhVP64

To find out more about the British Society for the History of Science, visit: http://www.bshs.org.uk