Two hundred years of mental healthcare in the city...
I’m
pulling into the car park of Fieldhead Hospital, which is home to the Mental Health Museum. Visits are by appointment only, one day a week
(despite the misinformation presented on the museum’s out of date website) and
I can’t help hoping that I’m going to be the only person in there.
After
following the gratifying directions of a member of staff – “Go left as far as
the big blue head…” – I’m shown in by the guy on the front desk and,
disappointingly, discover another couple are already in the one room of the
museum. If you’re hoping to have a museum to yourself, three’s a crowd. For a history nut, I thought this was going to be the museum equivalent of a celebrity
having a store open especially for them. Oh well.
My
visit is in support of my research into mental health provision within the
district over the last two hundred years. It was the name West Riding Pauper
Lunatic Asylum which first piqued my interest. As I looked into this
institution of the nineteenth century, I discovered that it was renowned across Europe.
I
will also be covering its twentieth century incarnation – Stanley Royd Hospital
– in this post. It was more difficult to find a positive story during this era,
as we shall see.
As
you delve into the world of mental health and the provision thereof, you
quickly grasp the difficulty of this area. Looking after the mentally ill has
been a history of successes and failings, reflecting the complicated nature of
the task facing the authorities.
This
article will try not to paint a picture of pure positivity nor one of persistent
pessimism. Some people have tried to improve matters, other people have not
done their best. Some patients have been helped by the system, while others
have clearly suffered. There have never been any easy answers.
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Fieldhead
is an appropriate location for the Mental Health Museum, as the hospital
primarily treats psychiatric conditions. The museum used to be called the Stephen
Beaumont Museum of Mental Health and could be found within Stanley Royd Hospital,
until it closed in 1995.
Crichton
Browne was a stickler for keeping records, both written and photographic. They
were so detailed and extensive that they are now protected by UNESCO, having
been recognised for their historic and medical importance.
Not
only was Crichton Browne a pioneering medical man; he was also by all accounts
a man of some charm. He often put this asset to good use in persuading people
to do things that would benefit the asylum.
The play had been staged at the nearby Stanley Hall the night before. That Gilbert appeared in the performance at the asylum is particularly remarkable as it is thought that this is the one and only time he performed in one of his own plays. He rarely even left London.
Not long afterwards,
however (1878), he teamed up with David Ferrer and two others who had
contributed valuable research at Wakefield’s asylum – John Charles Bucknill and
John Hughlings Jackson – to found a journal of neurology called ‘Brain’. This
journal of neurology continues today and is a fitting legacy of this time at
the institution.
After Crichton-Browne departed, the scientific reputation of the Asylum continued well into the interwar years. Indeed, two of his medical staff who succeeded him later provided the country with global contributions to Brain Histology.
However, the asylum was beginning to feel the strain from the number of patients being admitted. It had started as a safety net for mentally ill paupers, but was now taking paying residents and numbers spiralled well beyond a thousand by the century’s end. To a certain extent, it was a victim of its own success.
It seems that Crichton-Browne himself started to take a rather downcast view of mental illness, thinking modern life was somehow contributing to some kind of moral and physical degeneration of the population. This unfortunately led him down the path of eugenics in his later years (he died in 1938).
Popular though these
theories of forced improvement of the human race through sterilisation and the
like were in the early part of the twentieth century, they are highly
distasteful in our more progressive times. It’s a shame that a man who
contributed so much to the development of care for the mentally ill should have
felt the need to put forward such an argument.
Around the time of the asylum’s opening in 1818, treatment of those with mental conditions was still sometimes known as ‘mad-doctoring’. The term started to be used less as the century progressed until it was only used in print in a pejorative sense by the 1870s.
From 1900, the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum was no more, in name at least. It became the Wakefield Asylum and it included an ‘acute hospital’, which was later to become Pinderfields Hospital.
Nothing seemed to have improved by the 70s. A story in the Guardian I read on the Net described the story of ‘Meg’, who was admitted in 1972. She appeared to be nothing more than a depressed teenager, from how the article outlined her story, yet she was given three courses of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and was regularly strapped to her bed at night.
She remembered locked wards named after trees – Cedar, Ash, Oak and the like – where some patients had resided for over 40 years. One patient, she was told, had been born in the hospital 60 years previously. He didn’t seem to be suffering from any mental illness save for chronic institutionalism.
Whether or not that’s true – it’s difficult to imagine but not beyond the realms of possibility – Meg clearly had only bad memories of Stanley Royd and didn’t believe she was helped at all.
However, that is just one person’s perspective. I’m sure that other patients would have had a very different experience and staff of the time would have a different tale to tell again.
The museum at Fieldhead has an interesting section on ECT. I was surprised to discover that it’s still used today. Like a lot of people, my main knowledge of electro-convulsive therapy comes from ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’, the play and film in which it is used as a form of control. Jack Nicholson has his rebellious streak knocked out of him and is turned into a compliant zombie. That’s the truth of ECT, isn’t it? Not really (who would have thought you couldn’t take your facts from a Hollywood film).
ECT was developed by an Italian psychiatrist – Ugo Corletta – in the 1930s when he experimented with giving electric shocks to the brain of schizophrenics. Early use took place without anaesthesia or muscle relaxants and could be brutal, with bones sometimes broken.
Despite the horror show that ECT could sometimes engender, it became a popular treatment in the 1940s and 50s and was used for multiple mental conditions. A small amount of electricity is applied to the brain, producing a seizure that lasts between twenty and fifty seconds. The aim is to repair chemical imbalances in the brain that are causing the mental illness. It’s been likened to the key tool in the armour of the IT consultant – turning the computer off and on again.
Today, muscle relaxants and anaesthesia are administered to the patient and express permission is sought from the patient or family members before being used. Some patients swear it has helped them immeasurably, while others say it has not helped them at all and has led to problems with their memory.
Tellingly, doctors don’t know why it works for some patients and not others. Any such treatment is going to be difficult and controversial.
A ‘centrepiece’ of the museum is the padded room. It could be found in Stanley Royd until its closure in the nineties, though records suggest it wasn’t used after the 1950s. It is now one of the last padded cells in the country.
Padded cells were first introduced at the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum in the 1840s and by the 1900s, almost all wards at the asylum had one.
Fieldhead
is an appropriate location for the Mental Health Museum, as the hospital
primarily treats psychiatric conditions. The museum used to be called the Stephen
Beaumont Museum of Mental Health and could be found within Stanley Royd Hospital,
until it closed in 1995.
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Prior
to the eighteenth century, care of the insane was essentially non-existent. If
you were ‘mad’, you were possessed by evil demons or at least spiritually weak.
You were likely to be mocked, whipped, chained or locked up in prison.
Slowly – very slowly – attitudes began to change in the 1700s. A more humane approach known as ‘moral treatment’ gained traction, whereby it was thought that work routines and physical activity could help the insane find a role in society and perhaps even be cured.
There
has been a suggestion that this change in attitude was partly due to the mental
health problems of King George III. I mean, this was somebody important, not
like all those nutty paupers, so maybe it was time for the authorities to take
this matter seriously.
Slowly – very slowly – attitudes began to change in the 1700s. A more humane approach known as ‘moral treatment’ gained traction, whereby it was thought that work routines and physical activity could help the insane find a role in society and perhaps even be cured.
There
has been a suggestion that this change in attitude was partly due to the mental
health problems of King George III. I mean, this was somebody important, not
like all those nutty paupers, so maybe it was time for the authorities to take
this matter seriously.
Acts
of Parliament were passed and in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, asylums started to pop up across the country and what’s more, they
were subject to some form of inspection.
At
the forefront of this movement within the Yorkshire region was Samuel Tuke of
York. Tuke founded a retreat in York in 1792 that became a model for asylums
around the world and provided an attitude to psychiatric help that dominated
much of the nineteenth century. Through his lead, there was now a genuine
desire of people to actually help the mentally ill.
‘Tuke, a Quaker, believed in the sanctity of
life and of behaving kindly and morally to all of humanity.’ - Mark Davis,
author of Voices From The Asylum, a book on the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum.
The West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum near Wakefield was the sixth institution of its kind to be opened and it was Tuke who helped to found it. His grandson, William, advised on its design. Set in twenty-six acres of grass and woodland, it was established in 1818.
With the aim of providing a safe haven for the patients away from society, the asylum was to be entirely self-sufficient, with its own farm, bakery, butchery, dairy and chapel. The building was shaped like the letter H and had watchtowers, which must have given it something of a gaol-like look. The towers were mainly there, however, so that senior staff could make sure that junior staff were treating the patients properly.
Life was still austere, though. Residents often had to pick their clothes out from a pile on the floor, for example, but they were given jobs, such as working in the laundry, gardens or on the farm, if they were capable.
‘Moral treatment’ meant that every aspect of the patients’ lives were monitored and controlled. Some critics of the time called it ‘moral oppression’. They were no doubt dismissed as ‘do-gooders’ or ‘woolly liberals’.
Of course, though attempts were being made to treat the mentally ill better, medical knowledge was still very limited. This meant that many methods used to supposedly aid recovery were no better than might be employed by your average witch doctor.
Bleeding, blistering and purging were still being practised as late as the 1850s. Pouring water over a patient’s head was another. If they suffered from dizzy spells, what better way to cure them than stick them in a spinning chair. ‘Spinning in the head + spinning in a chair = no more spinning! Maybe. Well, I’ve no idea really, but it’s worth a try.’ The chair was still being spun as late as the 1820s.
The terms used to categorise diagnosis give an indication of the deficiencies in the system too:
Feeble minded – patients who needed looking after but were curable.
Imbecile – patients who were potentially curable.
Idiot – someone who had displayed symptoms from birth or an early age and was incurable (often these unfortunates would spend their whole life in institutions).
Further divisions of diagnosis might include ‘simple mania’ and ‘acute melancholia’, which give a hint that the modern age of medicine was beginning to dawn. We might guess that these conditions were similar to what we might term bi-polarity and depression today.
Still, it was estimated that up to 30 per cent of the asylum population was wrongly incarcerated during the 1800s. This doesn’t surprise me one bit having read in the museum why some people were committed. A very common reason was ‘drinking too much’, while one case the museum highlights was that of someone sent to the asylum for ‘reading plays and novels’. Presumably, this was a woman. I mean, what was she thinking, trying to expand her tiny female mind?
The West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum near Wakefield was the sixth institution of its kind to be opened and it was Tuke who helped to found it. His grandson, William, advised on its design. Set in twenty-six acres of grass and woodland, it was established in 1818.
With the aim of providing a safe haven for the patients away from society, the asylum was to be entirely self-sufficient, with its own farm, bakery, butchery, dairy and chapel. The building was shaped like the letter H and had watchtowers, which must have given it something of a gaol-like look. The towers were mainly there, however, so that senior staff could make sure that junior staff were treating the patients properly.
Life was still austere, though. Residents often had to pick their clothes out from a pile on the floor, for example, but they were given jobs, such as working in the laundry, gardens or on the farm, if they were capable.
‘Moral treatment’ meant that every aspect of the patients’ lives were monitored and controlled. Some critics of the time called it ‘moral oppression’. They were no doubt dismissed as ‘do-gooders’ or ‘woolly liberals’.
Of course, though attempts were being made to treat the mentally ill better, medical knowledge was still very limited. This meant that many methods used to supposedly aid recovery were no better than might be employed by your average witch doctor.
Bleeding, blistering and purging were still being practised as late as the 1850s. Pouring water over a patient’s head was another. If they suffered from dizzy spells, what better way to cure them than stick them in a spinning chair. ‘Spinning in the head + spinning in a chair = no more spinning! Maybe. Well, I’ve no idea really, but it’s worth a try.’ The chair was still being spun as late as the 1820s.
The terms used to categorise diagnosis give an indication of the deficiencies in the system too:
Feeble minded – patients who needed looking after but were curable.
Imbecile – patients who were potentially curable.
Idiot – someone who had displayed symptoms from birth or an early age and was incurable (often these unfortunates would spend their whole life in institutions).
Further divisions of diagnosis might include ‘simple mania’ and ‘acute melancholia’, which give a hint that the modern age of medicine was beginning to dawn. We might guess that these conditions were similar to what we might term bi-polarity and depression today.
Still, it was estimated that up to 30 per cent of the asylum population was wrongly incarcerated during the 1800s. This doesn’t surprise me one bit having read in the museum why some people were committed. A very common reason was ‘drinking too much’, while one case the museum highlights was that of someone sent to the asylum for ‘reading plays and novels’. Presumably, this was a woman. I mean, what was she thinking, trying to expand her tiny female mind?
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William
Charles Ellis was the first director of the asylum. A firm believer in moral
treatment and therapeutic employment, he referred to both staff and patients as
family. To him, the asylum was a community and he hoped that patients would
come to think that they had a home and were not imprisoned there.
He ordered that the use of restraints be restricted as much as possible (although
the museum does mention the existence of basement cells that were sometimes
used for the most difficult patients). Rewards, such as tobacco and tea, were
given for the completion of jobs, and the asylum was the first to implement an
aftercare scheme for patients. Charitable donations were used, for example, to
pay off debts, so as to help a person get into employment once they were
discharged.
Ellis spent thirteen years at the asylum from 1818 to 1831, in which time the population of the institution rose from 150 to 250 patients. He was the first psychiatrist to be knighted for his services to the field and the progressive attitude displayed during his time in Wakefield was a major contributor to his award.
Ellis spent thirteen years at the asylum from 1818 to 1831, in which time the population of the institution rose from 150 to 250 patients. He was the first psychiatrist to be knighted for his services to the field and the progressive attitude displayed during his time in Wakefield was a major contributor to his award.
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Life
in the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum was not without its problems. When
Ellis left to hobnob with the higher echelons of medical society in London,
patient numbers continued to rise. Under the directorship of four different
medical men over the next thirty-five years, the asylum expanded to accommodate
over 1,100 patients. Partly as a consequence, disease was never far away.
The
country experienced several cholera outbreaks in the 1830s and 40s and, despite
its relative isolation, the asylum was not immune to these. In 1849, for
example, 106 out of 620 patients died in the space of three months.
In the midst of one of
these epidemics, it would no doubt have been difficult to imagine that the
asylum was about to enter its golden age.
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James
Crichton-Browne was just 26 when he became Superintendent of the West Riding
Pauper Lunatic Asylum in 1866. Under the ten years of his leadership, the
asylum was transformed into a centre of scientific research that was renowned
throughout Europe and the world.
 |
'If you think my whiskers are mad...' |
Even
as a student, Crichton-Browne had been recognised for his intellect and in
Wakefield he brought a new innovative way of learning to the asylum. He founded
a laboratory for anatomy, neuropathy and histology (the biological study of
tissues). He was also the first director to issue clinical photographs of
patients.
Young
doctors began travelling from around the world to learn at the asylum in
Wakefield, using the state of the art laboratory and studying patients within
the secure environment. Their findings were published in the Asylum’s own journal, the West Riding Lunatic Asylum Medical Reports (1871-1876),
were discussed in the wider medical press and at medical conferences.
Annual
reports for the asylum around the time show huge medical advancements were
being made on the grounds of the institution in Wakefield. Perhaps the most
significant work was conducted by David Ferrer. He proved that different
bodily functions were conducted by different areas of the brain.
It’s
a shame that much of the empirical data he gathered came from experiments on
animals. Even back then there were protests by anti-vivisection campaigners,
but undoubtedly, major progress was made in the field of cerebral localisation
and a direct line can be seen from this research to the brain imaging that is
used in modern medicine.
Knowledge of cerebral localisation and the methods of experimental and pathological investigation being used in Wakefield pre-existed Crichton-Brown’s time at the asylum, but expertise certainly crystallised in this period and the benefits to the nascent neurological profession were immense.
In 1875, the British Medical Journal, commenting on the activities in Wakefield, wrote: ‘The West Riding Lunatic Asylum is now well known as one of the most admirably organised institutions of the kind in Europe. Under the directorship of Dr. Crichton Browne, who has the advantage of working under a most liberal and enlightened Board of Governors, the best results have been attained in every direction.’
Knowledge of cerebral localisation and the methods of experimental and pathological investigation being used in Wakefield pre-existed Crichton-Brown’s time at the asylum, but expertise certainly crystallised in this period and the benefits to the nascent neurological profession were immense.
In 1875, the British Medical Journal, commenting on the activities in Wakefield, wrote: ‘The West Riding Lunatic Asylum is now well known as one of the most admirably organised institutions of the kind in Europe. Under the directorship of Dr. Crichton Browne, who has the advantage of working under a most liberal and enlightened Board of Governors, the best results have been attained in every direction.’
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Crichton
Browne was a stickler for keeping records, both written and photographic. They
were so detailed and extensive that they are now protected by UNESCO, having
been recognised for their historic and medical importance.
Over
5000 photographs of patients from the late 1860s onwards exist. Some of these
were sent to the evolutionist Charles Darwin for his writing ‘The Expression of
the Emotions in Man and Animals’ in 1872, a project on which Darwin and Crichton
Browne collaborated.
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 |
| W S Gilbert |
In
1875, he even badgered W S Gilbert (of Gilbert & Sullivan fame) into staging
and appearing in a performance of the play ‘Pygmalion and Galatea’ in the
asylum’s theatre for the entertainment of the staff and patients.
The play had been staged at the nearby Stanley Hall the night before. That Gilbert appeared in the performance at the asylum is particularly remarkable as it is thought that this is the one and only time he performed in one of his own plays. He rarely even left London.
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Crichton-Browne
left the asylum to become the Lord Chancellor's Visitor in Lunacy when he left
in 1876 (as job title’s go, that’s a cracker).
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After Crichton-Browne departed, the scientific reputation of the Asylum continued well into the interwar years. Indeed, two of his medical staff who succeeded him later provided the country with global contributions to Brain Histology.
However, the asylum was beginning to feel the strain from the number of patients being admitted. It had started as a safety net for mentally ill paupers, but was now taking paying residents and numbers spiralled well beyond a thousand by the century’s end. To a certain extent, it was a victim of its own success.
It seems that Crichton-Browne himself started to take a rather downcast view of mental illness, thinking modern life was somehow contributing to some kind of moral and physical degeneration of the population. This unfortunately led him down the path of eugenics in his later years (he died in 1938).
W-HIPS > W-HIPS > W-HIPS > W-HIPS > W-HIPS >
Around the time of the asylum’s opening in 1818, treatment of those with mental conditions was still sometimes known as ‘mad-doctoring’. The term started to be used less as the century progressed until it was only used in print in a pejorative sense by the 1870s.
The
popular term of the time was ‘alienism’, with medical practitioners known as
‘alienists’.
After the 1890 Lunacy Act, patients could volunteer to be admitted to an asylum, rather than having to be certified. Also, they were no longer to be called paupers or lunatics. Instead, they were to be known as ‘rate aided persons of unsound mind’. Sounds like political correctness gone mad.
After the 1890 Lunacy Act, patients could volunteer to be admitted to an asylum, rather than having to be certified. Also, they were no longer to be called paupers or lunatics. Instead, they were to be known as ‘rate aided persons of unsound mind’. Sounds like political correctness gone mad.
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From 1900, the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum was no more, in name at least. It became the Wakefield Asylum and it included an ‘acute hospital’, which was later to become Pinderfields Hospital.
By
1948, the asylum had another new name. It was now to be known as Stanley Royd
Hospital. ‘Stanley’ because of its location within that area of Wakefield and
‘Royd’ due to it being an old Yorkshire word for ‘field’.
Although
the asylum offered the full array of twentieth century psychiatric treatments, it’s much harder to find optimistic stories
from this time. Patient numbers were large and the Victorian buildings were
beginning to show their age.
In
1948 a medical officer’s report to the new Leeds Regional Hospital Board
featured this description: ‘The old gaol-like buildings at Wakefield are gloomy
and depressing and the galleries where many patients aimlessly spend so much of
their time are deficient in natural lighting. The accommodation can best be
described as austerely pre-Dickensian, falling far short of usually acceptable
standards.”
Nothing seemed to have improved by the 70s. A story in the Guardian I read on the Net described the story of ‘Meg’, who was admitted in 1972. She appeared to be nothing more than a depressed teenager, from how the article outlined her story, yet she was given three courses of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and was regularly strapped to her bed at night.
She remembered locked wards named after trees – Cedar, Ash, Oak and the like – where some patients had resided for over 40 years. One patient, she was told, had been born in the hospital 60 years previously. He didn’t seem to be suffering from any mental illness save for chronic institutionalism.
Whether or not that’s true – it’s difficult to imagine but not beyond the realms of possibility – Meg clearly had only bad memories of Stanley Royd and didn’t believe she was helped at all.
However, that is just one person’s perspective. I’m sure that other patients would have had a very different experience and staff of the time would have a different tale to tell again.
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The museum at Fieldhead has an interesting section on ECT. I was surprised to discover that it’s still used today. Like a lot of people, my main knowledge of electro-convulsive therapy comes from ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’, the play and film in which it is used as a form of control. Jack Nicholson has his rebellious streak knocked out of him and is turned into a compliant zombie. That’s the truth of ECT, isn’t it? Not really (who would have thought you couldn’t take your facts from a Hollywood film).
ECT was developed by an Italian psychiatrist – Ugo Corletta – in the 1930s when he experimented with giving electric shocks to the brain of schizophrenics. Early use took place without anaesthesia or muscle relaxants and could be brutal, with bones sometimes broken.
Despite the horror show that ECT could sometimes engender, it became a popular treatment in the 1940s and 50s and was used for multiple mental conditions. A small amount of electricity is applied to the brain, producing a seizure that lasts between twenty and fifty seconds. The aim is to repair chemical imbalances in the brain that are causing the mental illness. It’s been likened to the key tool in the armour of the IT consultant – turning the computer off and on again.
Today, muscle relaxants and anaesthesia are administered to the patient and express permission is sought from the patient or family members before being used. Some patients swear it has helped them immeasurably, while others say it has not helped them at all and has led to problems with their memory.
Tellingly, doctors don’t know why it works for some patients and not others. Any such treatment is going to be difficult and controversial.
W-HIPS > W-HIPS > W-HIPS > W-HIPS > W-HIPS >
A ‘centrepiece’ of the museum is the padded room. It could be found in Stanley Royd until its closure in the nineties, though records suggest it wasn’t used after the 1950s. It is now one of the last padded cells in the country.
Padded cells were first introduced at the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum in the 1840s and by the 1900s, almost all wards at the asylum had one.
A modern-day equivalent –
the seclusion room or ‘de-escalation room’ - is still used today in
mental facilities as a last resort, including at Fieldhead.
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The white lab coat originated in the late nineteenth century and gained popularity in the twentieth century. It was supposed to promote an image of cleanliness. Previously, medical professionals generally wore black, to signify the seriousness of their role.
The Leicester band Kasabian strangely called their third studio album ‘The West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum’. They chose the name after their guitarist, Sergio Pizzorno, saw the documentary ‘A History of the Madhouse’.
I
agree that it is an evocative name, but he obviously felt it wasn’t quite
evocative enough, as the word ‘Riding’ was changed to ‘Ryder’. Whether or not
this was a choice or he just heard the name wrongly, there’s no doubt that the
album brought the asylum to the attention of a lot more people.
I wonder what James Crichton-Browne would have made of indie rock?
From the 1960s onwards, mental healthcare across the country entered a period of ‘de-institutionalism’. Essentially, the big asylums were closed and care moved more in the direction of outpatient provision and ‘care within the community’. As a result, from 1950 to the mid-1980s, the psychiatric inpatient population in Britain was reduced by 90%.
One of the main advocates of this
controversial change was Enoch Powell. The Health Minister from 1961, he
visited Stanley Royd in 1963, as part of his review of this area of treatment.
By 1968 he was delivering his infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech. Let’s hope
this wasn’t inspired by one of his hospital visits.
Perhaps the final hammer blow was delivered to Stanley Royd’s existence with the salmonella food poisoning outbreak that hit the hospital in 1984. Nineteen elderly patients died, while another three hundred were infected.
These tragic events shone a light on the inadequacy of the decaying Victorian buildings in their ability to offer modern healthcare. They also highlighted incompetences within NHS management structures.
There were accusations of a cover up and calls for someone to be held accountable. The NHS authorities, however, were able to hide behind the ‘crown immunity’ law. This rather outdated law meant that NHS managers were theoretically servants of the Queen. As such, they could not be prosecuted.
There was at least a public enquiry. Testimony was heard that the Victorian fabric of the buildings persistently interfered with the ability of staff to clean adequately, while the cold storage facilities and conveyancing of food to patients left much to be desired. Food sometimes even arrived at patients’ bed mouldy.
In addition, rats and cockroaches were common in the hospital’s cavernous kitchen and open drains festered. Worse still, environmental health officers had been warning the hospital for years that its kitchen and staff practices posed a threat to patients.
The enquiry also shone a light on the whole status and management of psychogeriatrics as a specialism within the NHS. Record keeping, for example, was so bad that it wasn’t even clear how many patients resided at the hospital. Crichton-Browne would have despaired.
The hospital was able to carry on, but its years were numbered. It closed for good in 1995.
Most of the buildings have been demolished, but the original structure, dating from the opening of the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum in 1818, remains. The building has been converted into residential flats, but it is still recognisable today as the old asylum.
As I wandered around the former grounds of the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum, I was pleased to find that one of the streets there is called Tuke Grove. William Tuke, of course, was the founding father of the institution.
The white lab coat originated in the late nineteenth century and gained popularity in the twentieth century. It was supposed to promote an image of cleanliness. Previously, medical professionals generally wore black, to signify the seriousness of their role.
Nowadays, the white lab
coat has gone out of fashion again, due to the stigma attached to it. The use
of the phrase ‘the men in white coats have come to take me away’ will, perhaps,
fade with time.
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The Leicester band Kasabian strangely called their third studio album ‘The West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum’. They chose the name after their guitarist, Sergio Pizzorno, saw the documentary ‘A History of the Madhouse’.
“The
album isn’t about the place…” he explained, “…the words just struck me. I love
the way it looked and the feeling it evokes.”
I wonder what James Crichton-Browne would have made of indie rock?
W-HIPS > W-HIPS > W-HIPS > W-HIPS > W-HIPS
From the 1960s onwards, mental healthcare across the country entered a period of ‘de-institutionalism’. Essentially, the big asylums were closed and care moved more in the direction of outpatient provision and ‘care within the community’. As a result, from 1950 to the mid-1980s, the psychiatric inpatient population in Britain was reduced by 90%.
One of the main advocates of this
controversial change was Enoch Powell. The Health Minister from 1961, he
visited Stanley Royd in 1963, as part of his review of this area of treatment.
By 1968 he was delivering his infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech. Let’s hope
this wasn’t inspired by one of his hospital visits.Perhaps the final hammer blow was delivered to Stanley Royd’s existence with the salmonella food poisoning outbreak that hit the hospital in 1984. Nineteen elderly patients died, while another three hundred were infected.
These tragic events shone a light on the inadequacy of the decaying Victorian buildings in their ability to offer modern healthcare. They also highlighted incompetences within NHS management structures.
There were accusations of a cover up and calls for someone to be held accountable. The NHS authorities, however, were able to hide behind the ‘crown immunity’ law. This rather outdated law meant that NHS managers were theoretically servants of the Queen. As such, they could not be prosecuted.
There was at least a public enquiry. Testimony was heard that the Victorian fabric of the buildings persistently interfered with the ability of staff to clean adequately, while the cold storage facilities and conveyancing of food to patients left much to be desired. Food sometimes even arrived at patients’ bed mouldy.
In addition, rats and cockroaches were common in the hospital’s cavernous kitchen and open drains festered. Worse still, environmental health officers had been warning the hospital for years that its kitchen and staff practices posed a threat to patients.
The enquiry also shone a light on the whole status and management of psychogeriatrics as a specialism within the NHS. Record keeping, for example, was so bad that it wasn’t even clear how many patients resided at the hospital. Crichton-Browne would have despaired.
The hospital was able to carry on, but its years were numbered. It closed for good in 1995.
Most of the buildings have been demolished, but the original structure, dating from the opening of the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum in 1818, remains. The building has been converted into residential flats, but it is still recognisable today as the old asylum.
W-HIPS > W-HIPS > W-HIPS > W-HIPS > W-HIPS
As I wandered around the former grounds of the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum, I was pleased to find that one of the streets there is called Tuke Grove. William Tuke, of course, was the founding father of the institution.
I wonder how many people who live on Tuke Grove know the
origin of the name of their address.
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