People Who Shaped Our World
What impression did Glenside have on those who lived and worked there?
Handwriting can be a problem!
I spent much of the last ten years researching the records of the Bristol Lunatic Asylum at the Bristol Archives and have created a fairly comprehensive database of all the patients admitted, currently reaching up to 1904. Although this is sometimes boring, it does produce a lot of evidence and sometimes intriguing information that requires further interrogation. This article explores what we can glean about those who wrote the notes, as well as intriguing glimpses of the patients and Bristol as an expanding industrial city.
The medical superintendents, just as doctors do today, have their own personal expertise and theories that influence their assessments. I have already written about the first two medical superintendents, Dr Stephens and Dr Thompson, and how their differing views on diagnosis and treatments affected the patients' experiences at the asylum. (This blog can be accessed on the museum website, entitled ‘At the Mercy of the Doctors’.)
Firstly, I have come to see that there is an indication of the health and stresses of working in the asylum in the handwriting. The cliché about a doctor's handwriting being difficult to read is certainly borne out by the asylum admission books.
In this article are a few examples I struggled to decipher.
Is this patient’s surname Hadu or Hader?
It’s an occupation and anyone who thinks they know what this is, please contact the Museum.
Merrick?
Most of the early medical superintendents had medical problems themselves, including depression. The handwriting of this particular doctor (it might be Dr Shaw) definitely deteriorated, which I suspect indicates a decline in his mental or physical health. His writing was often bad, and in the example, someone felt compelled to rewrite the surname ‘Merrick’ in a legible form.
Someone rewrote the surname ‘Merrick’ in a legible form
Doctors come with their own social values.
Secondly, the doctors held their own personal social values, which sometimes prejudiced their diagnoses. The following excerpt from an admission book shows both poor handwriting and a rare example of racial prejudice. One can just make out that the 41-year-old dressmaker’s first name was Amelia, but her surname might be Hamoon, Lamour, or something else. More worryingly, in the column for predisposing cause, they have written ‘racial difference of parents’. It could be argued that the intended meaning was that they suffered from racial prejudice, but a more likely explanation is that the doctor felt that the intermingling of two races had caused the problem.
As do we ...
Thirdly, we have our own assumptions. As the Bristol Asylum was for those who could not afford care and some 50% of patients were unemployed, it might be thought that they were largely illiterate, but this was not the case. The table, taken from my database, shows that the vast majority could read and write, and many of those who could not had some form of learning difficulty.
|
Literacy ability |
Female |
Male |
Average |
|
Neither read nor write |
12.0% |
12.2% |
12.1% |
|
Read only |
13.2% |
8.5% |
10.7% |
|
Read and write |
74.8% |
79.3% |
77.1% |
Even when the words are legible, I discovered that our modern interpretation is not always correct as their meaning has subtly changed. Thus, misinterpretations are easily made. For example, I noticed that a few patients' education status was listed as ‘fair’. From my own schooldays, if you were given the result of ‘fair’, it meant you were pretty awful at the subject but did turn up. However, I started to see that the patients whose education was designated as fair were often schoolteachers or accountants who must have had a good education. The lady in the example below was a private patient and lived in a grand house in Clevedon.
Another word that the Victorians used differently to us is ‘excitement’. The Victorians disapproved of excitement. If you can read the example below, it talks about the patient being ‘quieter but still excited’.
Bristol as an expanding city.
Now, Bristol was an expanding city, and it attracted many people to come to live and find work. The huge variety of jobs and backgrounds listed in the asylum records reflects this. There were artists, engineers, teachers, chemists, Protestant ministers, and a comedian. Some occupations I had to look up, but two, a baud master and a deal runner, remain unexplained. The following is a list of the male occupations from a few months in 1902:
|
fishmonger |
carpenter |
|
teacher |
garment maker |
|
labourer |
mason |
|
glass cutter |
gentleman’s outfitter |
|
grocer & post master |
cab driver |
|
chemist’s assistant |
boot rounder |
|
hairdresser |
flax weaver |
|
fitter |
carpenter |
|
labourer |
commission agent |
|
bricklayer |
iron turner |
|
upholsterer |
labourer |
|
marine engineer |
furniture dealer |
|
drover |
wood carver |
|
none |
painter |
|
chemist |
none |
|
bootmaker |
publican |
Sometimes it is possible to make comparisons of asylum populations to see the differences between cities and their populations. The following is a table I made comparing Bristol with Wolverhampton. Although such a table has certain methodological problems, it is evidence that the county asylums were not just the preserve of the lowest classes and demonstrates the profound gender differences in terms of employment.
|
Occupations |
Wolverhampton male |
Bristol male |
Wolverhampton female |
Bristol female |
Asylum male |
Asylum female |
|
Professional |
2.20% |
4.20% |
1.60% |
2.30% |
10.90% |
4.50% |
|
Domestic |
1.20% |
1.90% |
11.10% |
16.20% |
1.60% |
15.70% |
|
Commercial |
9.90% |
14.30% |
0.60% |
0.20% |
12.20% |
0.00% |
|
Agricultural |
1.20% |
1.10% |
0.07% |
0.02% |
3.60% |
0.00% |
|
Industrial |
57.10% |
47.80% |
10.50% |
16.70% |
57.60% |
21.90% |
|
Without occupation |
29.50% |
31.30% |
73.90% |
65.10% |
11.10% |
52.80% |
What you also get a sense of from the notes is when things at the asylum were not going well. On such occasions, the admission books are not completed as thoroughly. The example below of Martha Moore shows many parts of the admission book left uncompleted or marked as unknown. She had come from Cardiff, and they did not even find out if she was married.
Martha Moore
Later in the same year, 1904, many patients from north Bristol who had resided at the Gloucester Asylum were transferred to the Bristol Asylum. They all arrived on the fourth of October 1904. This must have placed a terrible strain on resources. The area from which the asylum took patients had expanded, and we begin to see patients from Shirehampton, Southmead, and Westbury on Trym. The poor record-keeping may be a consequence of the high turnover of staff at the asylum at this time; most had been there less than a year. High turnover often occurs when there is pressure to do more without extra resources. This resonates with the current situation in the NHS. Government funding authorities have little understanding of the consequences of policy changes on workload and thus the ability of the institution to deliver. In my day as an NHS mental health nurse, this was often termed ‘modernisation’ or ‘efficiency’; it was neither of those things.
Racial difference of parents
