Turn on, tune, in...investigate your subconscious?

On 19th April 1943, Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann accidentally got some of the chemical he was synthesising onto his fingers, resulting in what he described as a dreamlike intoxication that lasted for two hours. His employers, Sandoz pharmaceuticals were quick to recognise that this new drug, lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, had a lot of potential. It was soon being marketed as a psychiatric drug under the trade name Delysid.

Meanwhile in Worcestershire, Ronald Sandison had taken up his first consultancy post at Powick Hospital. Originally built in 1847 to house 200 inmates, the former Worcester County Pauper and Lunatic Asylum was home to around 1000 patients by the 1950s. In his autobiography, A century of psychiatry, psychotherapy and group analysis, Sandison described the hospital as “bleak in the extreme…I discovered that the heating was defunct, many of the internal telephones did not work, and the hospital was deeply impoverished in every department.” As part of attempts to transform the hospital by Sandison and his colleagues, in 1952 he embarked on a study tour of Swiss psychiatric hospitals. It was during this visit that he met Albert Hofmann and became aware of the therapeutic potential of LSD.

Returning to England with a supply of the drug, Sandison developed what he referred to as “psycholytic therapy”, using small amounts of LSD to assist patients in exploring their subconscious. By 1958, Powick Hospital had a dedicated LSD treatment unit, where Sandison worked until he left the hospital in 1964. LSD therapy continued at Powick for a further two years after Sandison’s departure. The increasing publicity around recreational use of LSD by figures such as Timothy Leary and Aldous Huxley, along with tighter regulation of its use, led to Sandoz withdrawing the drug from the market.

After leaving Powick Hospital, Sandison never again used LSD therapy. However, he continued to believe in its value as a treatment when used in a clinical setting.

Although Ronald Sandison is primarily remembered for his pioneering work in LSD therapy, this was far from his only area of expertise. His personal papers, now available at the Wellcome Library as PP/SAN, show Sandison as a medical renaissance man, who was successful in a number of different fields during his career. Besides his work with LSD and other psychedelic drugs like mescaline and psilocybin, the collection covers his work with the Group Analytic Society, (whose archives are also held by the library, as SA/GAS, and the Pastoral Development Group, as well as his work in in family planning, and with alcoholics in Shetland. Also included are a series of dream diaries kept by Sandison between 1948 and 2009.

Image:
Pink elephants on parade LSD blotter, from Wikimedia Commons - click for copyright information.

Private Minds, Public Collections

As custodians of major archive collections relating to mental health, including patient records from several private hospitals, the Wellcome Library is particularly interested in the issues raised when encouraging public access to, and engagement with, such potentially sensitive material. 

On Tuesday 7 February, as part of a seminar series on “Archives and Society”, Julian Pooley from Surrey History Centre will be giving a paper at the Institute of Historical Research, London, on “Private Minds, Public Collections: Exploring the Public Use of Mental Health Records”.

Surrey History Centre holds major collections of mental hospital records, one of which – the records of Holloway Sanatorium – is shared with the Wellcome Library, so it will be particularly interesting to learn from Julian’s experience. The seminar will be chaired by the Wellcome Library’s Archives & Manuscripts Manager, Jenny Haynes.

IHR seminars are free and open to all, so perhaps we’ll see some of you there? The session begins at 5.15pm in Room ST275, Stewart House, 2nd floor. More information is available from the IHR's website. 

Image: Medical Case history and photograph of Constance Butterworth, a patient of Holloway Sanatorium, from December 1900 to November 1901  (MS.5159) 

Guest Post: Neurology, the “Unconscious” and Victorian Psychiatry

The Bethlem Blog is run by the Bethlem Royal Hospital Archives and Museum to provide historical information on one of the world's oldest psychiatric hospitals, access to the Museum's art collection, and to contribute generally to the public understanding and destigmatisation of mental illness. This guest post discusses the work of one of the Hospital's Superintendents, Theophilus B. Hyslop (1863-1933).

The copy of Theo Hyslop’s 1895 publication, Mental Physiology in the Wellcome Library was, presumably, originally the doctor’s own, as it is interleaved with reviews, calling cards and letters to Hyslop from other mental health professionals, forming a fascinating archive in itself.

Mental Physiology was written mainly for the psychological part of Hyslop’s London M.D, which he completed while working as Assistant Medical Officer at Bethlem. Hyslop’s successor, William Stoddart, found it “strange” that the book never reached a second edition. [1] Perhaps Hyslop’s efforts to associate somatic and psychological theories of mental health and illness did not integrate easily with a growing divide between neurological and psychotherapeutic approaches. Nonetheless, Mental Physiology certainly shares similar evolutionary concerns with much British psychiatry of the period, in emphasising the importance of volition (or will) to both the individual and broader civilization, simultaneously associating mental ill-health with a loss of, or failure to attain, this self-control.

Hyslop was also heavily influenced by French neurology, much of which stemmed from the work of Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière in Paris. Mental Physiology contains numerous references to the writings of Charcot’s pupils, such as Charles Féré and Pierre Janet. Janet is of particular note here: his calling card appears among the numerous psychiatrists’ cards pasted into the Wellcome Library's copy of Mental Physiology (from physicians across Europe and the United States), presumably received when they either visited Bethlem or attended a conference or meeting of the Medico-Psychological Association.

A letter from Janet to Hyslop, also included in the Wellcome's edition of Mental Physiology, would seem to be part of a longer correspondence between the two, for it discusses the symptoms, and treatment, of a particular individual, presumably known to both parties. Since Henri Ellenberger’s research into The Discovery of the Unconscious in 1970, Janet’s work has been regarded as important in the formation ‘dynamic psychiatry’ and psychotherapeutic techniques, through his explorations into repressed memory, multiple personality and the connections between past events and present trauma. [2] It is interesting to see here evidence of an established link between French and English psychiatry during a period in which, according to the traditional historical view, continental ideas had limited influence in England.

[1] Stoddart, W. H. B. 1933. “Obituary: Theophilus Bulkeley Hyslop, M.D., CM., M.R.C.P.E., F.R.S.E.”. Journal of Mental Science 79, no. 325: 424-426.

[2] Ellenberger, H. 1970. The Discovery of the Unconscious: the History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. New York: Basic Books.

This post also appears on the Bethlem Blog.

A celebration of Louis Wain’s Cats at Brent Museum

An exhibition of cat illustrations by Louis Wain (1860-1939) has recently opened at Brent Museum, Willesden Green Library Centre, London, NW10. A visit is highly recommended, especially if you are a fan of Wain, cats or the art of anthropomorphism! Wain is one of Brent’s most famous artists, having lived in the local area in the early twentieth century with his sisters and mother in a house on Brondesbury Road.

The Wellcome Library’s Archives and Manuscripts department has contributed to the exhibition two drawings, which originate from the papers of Noel Gordon Harris (1897-1963), presented to the Library in 1985. Harris was a specialist in psychological medicine and early on in his career was appointed to a position at Springfield Mental Hospital, Tooting, South West London. At this time Louis Wain was a patient at the hospital, having been admitted to the pauper ward in 1924, following bouts of erratic and occasionally violent behaviour. It is likely that the two drawings came into Harris’s possession some time between then and shortly after Wain was moved to Bethlem Royal Hospital, South London, around 1925. It is known that Wain often gave away his drawings, which he produced in vast quantities, to friends and acquaintances.

Although such a notion can only be purely speculative, one of the Wellcome drawings, of a rather spiky looking cat, seems to make a dig at the medics who were treating him, captioned by him “Caught! Keep your mouth shut, and let me open your mind for you”. Of course there have been numerous interpretations of Wain’s drawings in the context of understanding his mental health problems. Once considered schizophrenic, more recently he has been thought to have had Asperger’s syndrome and Visual agnosia, which would certainly go some way in explaining his obsessive drawing of cats and the intricate patterns of some of his more ‘kaleidoscopic’ cat drawings.

Further examples of the breadth of Wain’s cat images are held by the Paintings, Prints and Drawings collection of the Wellcome Library, comprising two ‘conventional’ humorous images and two ‘serious’ highly patterned images. It is easy to be unnerved by the ‘mad staring eyes’ of the latter cat image, but on the other hand some people may find the whole notion of cats singing, playing cricket or tobogganing much stranger! Whatever our opinions, the therapeutic value of art for patients in medical settings has gained wide credence since the 20th century. The Wellcome Library continues to collect primary and secondary sources on patient art and art in mental illness, two notable examples can be found in the archives of Rudolph K. Freudenberg [PP/RKF] and a soon to be catalogued small collection of Edward Adamson, pioneer of art therapy.

If the exhibition in NW10 wets your appetite then swiftly turn your attention to the Chris Beetles Gallery and the Bethlem Art and History Collections Trust. The Brent Museum exhibition consists chiefly of works loaned by these two organisations.

“Communicating Through Cats: The Art and Mind of Louis Wain”, Brent Museum, runs until 29th October 2011. A series of free exhibition related events will include a talk by Wain biographer Rodney Dale on 23 June.

Images:
- Drawing of cat by Louis Wain, from papers of Noel Gordon Harris (PP/NGH/58)
- A cat in "gothic" style. Gouache by Louis Wain, 1925/1939 (Wellcome Library no. 38887i)

Author: Amanda Engineer

Wellcome Library Insight - Madness

This week's free Wellcome Library Insight session - on Thursday 20th May - explores changing ideas about mental illness, 'madness' and its treatment, through material from the Wellcome Library's collections.

Our Insight sessions offer visitors to the Wellcome Library an opportunity to explore the variety of our holdings. Sessions are thematic in style, last around an hour and offer a chance to learn about our collections from a member of Library staff.

The session starts at 3.00pm and tickets are available from the Wellcome Collection Information Desk from 1.30pm onwards. For more details, see the Wellcome Collection website.

Richard Dadd in France – and in New York

"Sketch of the murder of Henry the Sixth in the Tower by Richard Duke of Gloucester, afterwards King Richard the Third ... by Richard Dadd, Bethlem Hospital, 1853." Wellcome Library no. 570213i

On 28 August 1843 the painter Richard Dadd, who had previously shown signs of insanity, stabbed his father to death in Cobham Park in Kent, believing him to be the devil in disguise. He then escaped to France, where his attempted murder of a fellow traveller in a carriage led to his arrest, imprisonment in a series of French asylums, extradition back to England, trial, and admission to a secure ward in a lunatic asylum for life. After twenty years in Bethlem (1844-1864) he was moved to Broadmoor secure hospital where he died in 1886. As an artist he is best known for two extraordinary paintings: The fairy-feller's master-stroke, in Tate Britain (presented by Siegfried Sassoon in 1963; not always on display) and Contradiction: Oberon and Titania, which currently belongs to Andrew Lloyd Webber. [1]

Dadd's flight to France after the murder was natural enough, for he had only recently arrived back in England from France after a foreign trip to Turkey, Syria, the Holy Land and Egypt in the retinue of Sir Thomas Phillips (1801-1867: not the manuscripts-collector Sir Thomas Phillipps, as erroneously stated in the original version of this posting, but a former mayor of Newport in Wales). Dadd's episodes of madness in France will have left some evidence there, but none has hitherto been cited. Now references to him in medical literature have been traced by Hélène Klemenz who has published a note on them in the current issue of the The Burlington magazine. [2].

After being shunted through five other asylums, Dadd was admitted to the psychiatric hospital at Clermont de l'Oise, about 35 miles north of Paris, where he was a patient for ten months of the physician Eugène-Joseph Woillez (1811-1882). Woillez discussed Dadd in a monograph that he published in 1849 "on the improvement of the lot of the insane person considered as a social individual". [3] Historians may be forgiven for overlooking this work: the union catalogue OCLC records no copy of it in the UK or USA and only three copies in France (Paris 2-Bordeaux 1). Fortunately a digital copy of the printed text is available on the Gallica website of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Woillez's earlier publications were on antiquarian subjects: the British Library has under his name a work on "Archéologie des monumens religieux de l’ancien Beauvoisis, pendant la métamorphose Romane", Paris 1839-1849 and an article on the iconography of lilies in mediaeval heraldry (the fleur de lis figures on the Clermont coat of arms). [4] His later published works are mostly on respiratory medicine. In the middle comes the rare monograph on the improvement of the life of the insane dating from his time as director of the asylum at Clermont, when he, like Philippe Pinel in Paris, had occasion to ponder on how the lives of asylum inmates could be improved.

A rough translation of the passage about Richard Dadd follows:

"The newspapers of 1845 reported the parricide committed in England by a distinguished painter named Dadd, who fled knowingly after the perpetration of that act in order to escape the punishment of the law, and who was nothing but a poor lunatic. He was arrested in France when he tried to cut the throat of a traveller who was unknown to him and who happened to be next to him in a carriage. Dadd's mental disorder was then obvious: he was directed to the Clermont asylum where I had him under my eyes over ten months.

"This young man was a monomaniac exalted by hallucinations and illusions of the most dangerous type. All those who surrounded him were black devils who had to be put to death. His unfortunate father, like the traveller in the carriage, was also a devil whom he had to kill, as he told me several times. I myself was Jesus Christ to him, not that he respected me any the more for it.

"His illusions took on an extraordinary degree of activity when he had spent several hours in a sort of ecstasy, staring directly at the sun, which happened to him frequently. The act of parricide in this case was not at all one of those spontaneous, instinctive and irresistible bouts of monomania which one is compelled to admit in certain cases, but the consequence of reason perverted by the most manifest type of raving imagination, depriving Dadd of all moral freedom."

For the context in which this description occurs, see the book. Among other subjects, Woillez also discusses the possible prevention of aggressive behaviour by the insane, and what right the state has to prevent it by pre-emptive incarceration before any criminal act has been committed—a question still being wrestled with today. Klemenz states that Woillez's case notes on Dadd are in the archives of the Hospital of Clermont de l'Oise, and refers to some of them: specifically, that Dadd was staring at the sun because he regarded it as an incarnation of Osiris, a deity he had become involved with while attending Phillipps in Egypt. He still believed that he was subject to the arbitrary whim of Osiris thirty years later in Broadmoor.

The watercolour by Dadd reproduced above shows Richard Duke of Gloucester, subsequently King Richard III, after killing Henry VI in the Tower of London in May 1471. It is one in a series of watercolours of the passions, this one being Hatred. The duke gloats over the red gouttes of Lancastrian blood that dribble down his sword and splash on to the ground. Another version of the same subject (in Bethlem Hospital) is called by Allderidge "one of Dadd's most frightening pictures". If it is just a strange coincidence that a man called Dadd should have killed his father, what must have been going through that man's mind when, being called Richard and having committed murder by stabbing with a knife, he painted another man also called Richard holding a sword dripping with blood?

Another fine watercolour by Dadd in the same series was bought in 2007 by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and is reproduced here from the museum's online catalogue. The watercolour was discovered by Andrew Sim of Sim Fine Art in a provincial auction in the UK: although recorded, it had been lost after it was auctioned at Christie's in 1870, and no illustration of it existed. Annotated by Dadd "Sketch to illustrate the passions. Senility or peevishness", it shows a suspicious old man selling something from a barrow to two ruffians outside an inn, watched by the inn-keeper holding a pipe. Now New Yorkers do not need to travel to London to enjoy a frisson at Richard Dadd's menacing sense of humour.

[1] Patricia Allderidge, The late Richard Dadd, London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1974
[2] Hélène Klemenz, 'Richard Dadd and his demons in France', The Burlington magazine, 2010, 152: 227
[3] Eugène-Joseph Woillez, De l'amélioration du sort de l'homme aliéné considéré comme une individualité sociale, Paris: V. Masson, 1849, pp. 48-50
[4] Eugène-Joseph Woillez, 'Iconographie des plantes aroides figureées au moyen age en Picardie, et considerées comme origine de la fleur de lis en France', Mémoires de la Société des Antiquaires de Picardie, 1848.