Category
Inconvenient People
One of the most mysterious figures in Inconvenient People is Dr John Parkin. He first crops up in 1838 as a very early member of the patient advocacy body the Alleged Lunatics’ Friend Society; but eight years later he was… Continue reading →
There was a lucrative trade in handbooks for doctors of psychological medicine – guides published on how to comply with the latest laws on the certification and detention of alleged lunatics. John Millar, superintendent of East London lunatic asylum Bethnal… Continue reading →
. . . and the gatepost, both taken by me during a long walk. Below, Ticehurst in the 1830s. Tweet
In the V&A Museum is an opulent example of gratitude to someone who fought on behalf of sane patients who found themselves certified into insane asylums. In the late 1840s, Gloucestershire magistrate Purnell B. Purnell (pictured below) single-handedly instigated an… Continue reading →
On a visit to Somerset I made a long overdue field trip to the various sites where The Abode of Love religious cult was located, 1840s to 1960s. In Chapter 4 of Inconvenient People I tell the story of how… Continue reading →
Charles Mercier (1851-1919) wrote his Text-Book on Insanity in 1902; it’s more straight-laced than most, and the following section should be read in your best Mr Cholmondley-Warner voice. (In the final paragraph, Mercier is unable to deal with the love… Continue reading →
There were many guidebooks and manuals of insanity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was a competitive, potentially lucrative field, in which the mind doctors could put into print their theories and guidance based on their own… Continue reading →
These two adverts on the back page of The Asylum Journal of Mental Science, July 1854, show a female “lunatics” attendant advertising for a position (bottom), and a male attendant adding that he knows of some good women for such… Continue reading →
Concerned that people with epilepsy may damage their heads while fitting, one enterprising asylum worker patented a reinforced hat (which could be worn by both male and female patients). This sketch of the bonnet was circulated in the medical press… Continue reading →
The Lunacy Law Reform Association meeting of 20 May 1874, in Gower Street, Bloomsbury, gets hijacked by a rather unsavoury subject: Tweet