Books: Exhibiting Madness in Museums: Remembering Psychiatry through Collections and Display

This collection of 11 essays edited by Catharine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon aims “to address some of the most pressing issues of our time regarding the exhibition and interpretation of the personal experiences of mental illness in the post-institutional age”.

The essays are grouped into three sections. Ways of Seeing and Remembering Psychiatry in the Museum considers the way in which collections relating to psychiatry have emerged as a result of institutional closures, often reflecting the need of medical and nursing staff to preserve the material culture of their working lives.

Volunteers or retired staff often maintain such collections and this can result in one-sided interpretation.

“The unifying quality of these collections has been their use in writing the evolutionary history of psychiatry, where the past represents a ‘horror’ that contrasts with the more enlightened practices of the present,” the book notes.

Reality is rarely so straightforward, and in a thoughtful essay on photography and the asylum Barbara Brookes considers the way in which photographs of individual patients were collected by doctors, initially to provide evidence of typologies but increasingly, as the asylum population grew, for the purpose of identification.

Brookes explores the way in which such photographs have become removed from their original purpose over time, their value now as evidence of individuality rather than of type, and offering a unique photographic record “of people who perhaps did not usually get to pose for a camera”.

The second section, Material Culture and Memories of Madness, examines the wider community’s role in remembering the history of mental health treatment, and considers whether community-led projects, such as memorial gardens and restored asylum cemeteries, have the potential to replace hospital museums as “sites of memory”.

An analysis of the Remembering Goodna exhibition shows that community interest and involvement should be regarded as a valuable resource rather than a threat: the collaborative curatorial approach adopted by the Museum of Brisbane in developing the exhibition allowed seemingly everyday objects to be transformed through the memories of those who had experience of them.

The section also includes a fascinating study by Bronwyn Labrum of clothing used within psychiatric institutions, which contrasts the formal military style uniforms worn by staff with the often shapeless garments issued to patients.

Labrum examines the way in which the “soft material world” of the asylum has been reduced to the stereotype of the straitjacket, and presents this as a “story of gender”: objects relating to male recreational activity (sporting trophies, equipment used on the asylum’s farms and in its workshops) are traditionally far more likely to be on display than are the garments which female patients might have sewn, or washed in the asylum’s laundry.

The final section, Bodies and Fragments, considers the historical role of asylums in supplying cadavers for anatomical teaching and research, and the display of the body parts of deceased patients, whether as specimens in traditional medical museums or as part of commercial displays such as Bodyworlds.

The volume concludes with an essay by Fiona Parrott, which brings the reader firmly back to the land of the living. The Material and Visual Culture of Patients in a Contemporary Psychiatric Secure Unit is based on interviews with service users in a UK forensic setting and examines attitudes to clothing, personal possessions and room decoration.

The findings invite the reader to consider whether those who collect and display the material culture of the psychiatric environment imbue such objects with more significance than did their original owners or users.

This is a worthwhile book and is far more accessible than its cover might suggest. But the editors’ claim that it will provide “a comparative history of independent and official institutional collections of psychiatric objects in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the UK” will leave UK readers feeling poorly served.

While volunteer-run displays at Kenmore Hospital Museum in Australia and Porirua Hospital Museum in New Zealand are described in some detail, UK equivalents such as the Crichton Royal Museum in Dumfries and Glenside Hospital Museum in Bristol receive no mention.

This gripe aside, this volume raises interesting questions about ethics and informed consent, and should be required reading for anyone with responsibility for collections relating to medicine or psychiatry.

Victoria Northwood is the head of archives and museum at the Bethlem Royal Hospital in Beckenham, Kent