Abstract
We live near a palatial apartment complex, rumoured to house Premier League footballers and former talent show judges. Princess Park Manor boasts its own gym, swimming pool and 30 acres of parkland. Promotional materials puff its Victorian history and boast that at the time of its opening in 1851 the central corridor under the Italianate dome was the longest in Europe. Yet the adverts are coy about its original function: the Middlesex County Pauper Lunatic Asylum, which by the time it was renamed the Friern Hospital housed 2700 patients. In Coleborne and MacKinnon’s important volume, Barbara Brookes’ chapter tells us that photographic and archival remnants of a century and a half of treatment there can be found in the Wellcome Library; I suspect that few material traces remain in Princess Park Manor itself. As readers of History of Psychiatry know, by the time the Friern Hospital closed in 1995, there were very few similar institutions operating. With the late twentieth-century shifts in psychiatric practice away from institutionalization, much of the material and visual culture of the asylum was lost.
Exhibiting Madness in Museums draws our attention to the few traces that do survive and how they are now used in interesting ways. Concentrating largely on the Australasian context, 11 pithy chapters provide us with a sensitive and informed cultural geography of collecting and displaying the history of mental illness. The editors are well placed to have gathered and presented their colleagues’ work, with excellent track records in this field.
What is striking about the material culture discussed is how mundane it is. We see this especially in MacKinnon’s study of the traces of patient pastimes and in Bronwyn Labrum’s discussion of clothing, especially the iconic strait-jacket. Labrum sagely invites us to consider this iconic garment ‘materialising misery’. Not surprisingly, photographs are prominent, and Brookes treats them as ‘melancholy objects’, after Susan Sontag. ‘I suppose you want a picture of a mad-woman,’ remarked one patient to her photographer, ‘I’d better stick some straw in my hair and make faces’ (p. 35).
Friern Hospital opened in the year of the Great Exhibition, but the original exhibitionary function of these institutions – places to visit, to inspect, to view the insane – is not explored as far as it might have been. Rather, attention is paid to the post-mortem fate of the patients’ remains in Helen MacDonald’s and Gareth Jones’ overlapping chapters on the relationship between asylums and anatomy museums, the dark underbelly of nineteenth-century medical museums. Both chapters necessarily tackle ethical challenges inherent in this material, as does the chapter by Nurin Veis. Her discussion of the appropriate use of memories and the potentially powerful responses they might illicit constitutes one of several suggestions as to how best to promote good practice in the public understanding of mental health. The patients’ perspective is clear throughout.
The best chapters not only examine the collecting and display of the remnants of psychiatry’s past but also address the broader question of how the lived experience of mental illness is remembered. Fiona Parrott is especially good on the role of memory in her contemporary ethnography; her piece is thereby quite distinct from the other chapters and does not fit into the ‘Bodies and Fragments’ section in which it has been placed, but works well in the volume nonetheless.
In its astute attention to the relationship between collections, exhibitions and memory, this volume, and especially the chapter by Nathan Flis and David Wright, thereby contributes to and draws from the growing literature that tackles so-called ‘difficult heritage’ – the memorialization of conflict sites and of genocide (including the recent completion of several holocaust museums). Joanna Besley and Mark Finnane also connect this work to the growing awareness of the representation of disability in museums and galleries.
Edited collections do not always sit together well, but this one has been carefully shaped, and the chapters, while presenting different studies and contrasting disciplinary perspectives, form a coherent whole. Unfortunately, Routledge has let the editors down in the production of this volume – Research in Museum Studies is an expensive series and this volume, like the others, deserved better quality illustrations, given the centrality of the visual to many of the chapters. The content more than makes up for this, however. Historians and curators would do well to dip into the chapters that appeal. There needs to be more critical attention paid to the rich intersection of the history of psychiatry and medical museology: Exhibiting Madness in Museums sets the bar high.