West Riding Asylum Research Articles

Pioneers of cortical cytoarchitectonics: the forgotten contribution of Herbert Major

The study of cortical cytoarchitectonics and the histology of the human cerebral cortex was pursued by many investigators in the second half of the nineteenth century, such as Jacob Lockhart Clarke, Theodor Meynert, and Vladimir Betz. Another of these pioneers, whose name has largely been lost to posterity, is considered here: Herbert Coddington Major (1850–1921). Working at the West Riding Asylum in Wakefield, United Kingdom, Major’s thesis of 1875 described and illustrated six-layered cortical structure in both non-human primates and man, as well as “giant nerve cells” which corresponded to those cells previously described, but not illustrated, by Betz. Further journal publications by Major in 1876 and 1877 confirmed his finding of six cortical strata. However, Major’s work was almost entirely neglected by his contemporaries, including his colleague and sometime pupil at the West Riding Asylum, William Bevan-Lewis (1847–1929), who later (1878) reported the presence of both pentalaminar and hexalaminar cortices. Bevan-Lewis’s work was also later credited with the first illustration of Betz cells.

Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum: Doctors, Patients, and Practices, by Jennifer Wallis

Reviewed by: Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum: Doctors, Patients, and Practices by Jennifer Wallis Athena Vrettos (bio) Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum: Doctors, Patients, and Practices, by Jennifer Wallis; pp. xvi + 276. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, $31.00, €29.12. Jennifer Wallis’s Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum: Doctors, Patients, and Practices dives into the scientific practices and procedures of the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum in Yorkshire in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Seeking to address the place of the body in the history of psychiatry, Wallis’s study reveals how a number of large public asylums like West Riding linked the task of patient care to a broad range of scientific research into the somatic origins of mental disease. Delving into records that include patient photographs, microscopic slides, lab reports, and postmortem examinations, Wallis illuminates the Victorian asylum’s dual function as scientific laboratory and medical ward. Investigating the Body thus highlights the role that physiological, pathological, and bacteriological work played in the care of mental patients in this era, and the role that asylum doctors played in the search for biological bases of mental disease. In particular, Wallis focuses on a diagnosis that preoccupied the doctors of West Riding and many other asylums in this era. “General paralysis of the insane,” or “general paralysis,” was a progressive and chronic condition that combined mental and physical symptoms ranging from hallucinations and delusions to disturbed reflexes, fragile bones, and diminished muscle control (10). General paralytic patients were numerous at West Riding and other lunatic asylums, and their prognosis was grim. But their combination of mental and physical symptoms seemed to offer an unusually promising vehicle for studying the somatic basis of mental disease, a theory that was increasingly being embraced by the field of psychiatry. Though late-Victorian doctors were only beginning to speculate about possible links between general paralysis and syphilis, by the early twentieth century, with the discovery of the spirochete, the amorphous diagnostic category of general paralysis was replaced by neurosyphilis. Wallis makes it clear, however, that her interest is [End Page 710] in neither retrospective diagnosis nor the celebration of scientific discovery, but rather in “bringing to the surface” previously unrecognized scientific investigations that general paralysis inspired in Victorian asylums (7). This metaphor of surface and depth runs throughout Investigating the Body, most conspicuously and successfully in the structure of its chapters. Using the postmortem examination as her organizing principle, Wallis takes the reader through a series of investigations—moving from skin to muscle to bone to brain to fluids—with each chapter probing a deeper layer of the body and pairing that layer with a related socio-historical question or controversy. This approach yields some surprising insights, transforming a potentially narrow focus on a few decades of asylum records into a much wider and richer exploration in the social history of science. Wallis’s first chapter, “Skin,” for example, analyzes the use of medical photography in the Victorian asylum and its specific role in studying and treating skin conditions. Wallis notes that in the West Riding catalog, patients were photographed both clothed and unclothed, in the wards and the gardens, during life and after death. One doctor appears in a photograph with a patient’s brain being removed from the skull at postmortem; other lab photos record microscopic slides of brain and muscle tissues. Wallis situates these records as part of a wider investigative enterprise, including contemporary debates about the ethical implications of clinical photography. She notes that the motivations behind the photographs could vary widely, blurring the boundaries between public and private, medical and nonmedical functions. This occasionally produced jarring conjunctions. While an asylum in Surrey dressed up residents as literary characters, a patient from West Riding is photographed naked to record his skin lesions, arms crossed defiantly and staring at the camera against a decorative backdrop of clouds. In the chapter “Muscle,” Wallis demonstrates how doctors studying the body-brain relationship through the muscle wasting of general paralysis intersected with contemporary research on cerebral localization. Keen to prove the scientific value of psychiatric hospitals, one of West Riding’s most prominent supervisors, James...

The Accommodation, Experiences and Concerns of the Mentally Unwell Poor in Mid-nineteenth Century Leeds

Prior to the implementation of the Poor Law Amendment Act, the provision for the mentally ill poor in the nineteenth century was founded in local welfare mechanisms. Township administrations had several choices for their accommodation: pension type payments or casual relief to help maintain them in their homes in the community; admittance to the workhouse; or application to the county asylum. Analysis of the case notes of patients treated in the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum at Stanley Royds near Wakefield, correlated with local records, permits an investigation into the concerns, experiences and beliefs of those admitted there. In so doing it reveals the social, religious and economic preoccupations which may have contributed to illness, and provides a rich insight into the lives of the poor in mid-nineteenth century Leeds.

Sir James Crichton-Browne

I am most grateful to Dr Thomas Walmsley for keeping alive the memory of Sir James Crichton-Browne ( Psychiatric Bulletin , January 2003, 27 , 20-22), one of the very few really outstanding Victorian asylum alienists. Crichton-Browne was the Medical Superintendent of the West Riding Asylum,

The resignation of Sir William Charles Ellis.

Sir William Ellis (1780-1839) was superintendent of the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum and Hanwell Asylum. He was a practitioner of moral therapy and non-restraint. He added his own religious aspects to his treatment based on his personal experiences. These interventions were novel and benefitted his patients. However, he is less well known in the present day than his contemporaries who also championed non-restraint. In 1838, he left Hanwell Asylum, as he disagreed with plans to expand patient capacity. The resurgence of Whig politics at the time also played its part in his resignation. Ellis died one year later, his contributions to modern psychiatry remaining in relative obscurity. This paper seeks to shed light on Ellis and analyse his resignation as an example of how politics can affect healthcare.

In the shadow of the asylum: the Stanley Royd Salmonella outbreak of 1984

In August 1984, an outbreak of Salmonella at Stanley Royd Psychiatric Hospital in Yorkshire led to the deaths of 19 elderly residents. It was an incident that attracted a good...

'Without decontextualisation': the Stanley Royd Museum and the progressive history of mental health care.

This paper builds on recent scholarship exploring museum exhibitions and the heritage of mental health care. Using the development of the Stanley Royd Museum in the mid-1970s as a case study, the paper will examine the rationale for the opening of the museum and its link to changing perceptions of mental hospitals in both historical study and what was then 'current' practice. It will then provide an overview of the proposed audience for the new museum and briefly analyse its success in communicating its history to its visitors. Ultimately, it will question how successful mental health professionals were in presenting the progressive nature of institutional care at a time when the system was being radically overhauled and reoriented.

Yorkshire's influence on the foundation of British Neurology

In a paper to the Royal Society in 1939, Lord Adrian (1889–1977) described the era between 1870 and 1900 as ‘a classical period in the history of medicine, the period...

‘This excellent observer …’: the correspondence between Charles Darwin and James Crichton-Browne, 1869-75

Between May 1869 and December 1875, Charles Darwin exchanged more than 40 letters with James Crichton-Browne, superintendent of the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum, Wakefield, Yorkshire. This paper charts their relationship within the context of Darwin's wider research networks and methods; it analyses the contribution that Crichton-Browne made to the writing of Expression, arguing that the information he provided materially affected Darwin's thesis, and that it was partly the need to assimilate this that led Darwin to publish Expression separately from Descent. The letters help to reconstruct Crichton-Browne's early research interests, and document Darwin's little-explored role as a patron. Both men are revealed within a collaborative scientific network, with each of them at various times a beneficiary or a promoter.

The Asylum, the Poor Law and the Growth of County Asylums in Nineteenth-Century Yorkshire

In 1868, an article in the Yorkshire Post about the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum drew attention to Yorkshire's pivotal role in the history of mental health care. It was because of this history, it was claimed, that Yorkshiremen had a special interest in the treatment of the insane. The purpose of this paper is to explore critically this assumption in light of the recent work on the Poor Law's relationship with the asylum. The growth and development of two asylums in the neighbouring North and West Ridings of Yorkshire will be compared and contrasted. The first part of the paper offers a brief explanation of Yorkshire's pivotal role in the history of the institutional approach to the problems of mental health and the growth of institutions in the counties. Central to the paper will be an examination of how each county responded to the differing demands on its resources and how this impacted on the nature of care at each institution. Ultimately, this paper aims to show how Poor Law finances contributed significantly to the development of each institution.

'Embarrassed circumstances': gender, poverty, and insanity in the West Riding of England in the early-Victorian years.

Gender assumptions in early-Victorian England held that men derived their identities from work, while women were dependent beings for whom employment was not a central component of identity. Yet just as the New Poor Law positioned women ambiguously, sometimes emphasising women's dependency and other times stressing women's ability to work, so too do asylum records reveal complicated relationships between gender, poverty, and employment. Patient case notes from the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum suggest that employment was a central component of poor women's identities. Female insanity was sometimes attributed to a lack of work, and both medical practitioners and female patients expected poor women to be employed.

Minds Behind the Brain: A History of the Pioneers and Their Discoveries

Minds Behind the Brain: A History of the Pioneers and Their Discoveries

Dysfunctional domesticity: female insanity and family relationships among the West Riding poor in the mid-nineteenth century.

"Dysfunctional domesticity" contributes to the growing reevaluation of the importance of the history of the family to understanding the history of insanity. Using patient case histories from the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum, this article examines representations of family life among poor in England in the 1830s and 1840s. Among the so-called moral causes of insanity, family relationships held a prominent place. Female patients more than male patients had their mental illnesses attributed to their domestic circumstances: the poverty of their home lives, grief over a death of friends and family, love and marital relationships gone wrong, and violence in their homes. The case histories reveal that poor women experienced many pressures in the domestic sphere, and insanity may have been one way to escape dysfunctional domesticity.

Rebuilding a Service after a Public Inquiry

A food poisoning outbreak in 1984 at Stanley Royd Hospital in Wakefield resulted in a Public Inquiry, and changes in catering policy in the public sector. Radical changes resulted in the management system, the managers and the structures and fabric of the kitchens.

Salmonella and Complications Related to Age — Sheffield Experience

Three instances of extra-intestinal infection in elderly patients and the recent outbreak at Stanley Royd Hospital promoted a retrospective review of all salmonella infections seen at the Regional Diseases Unit over a 30-month period with particular reference to management of those over the age of 65 years. The survey has confirmed a more protracted illness with higher mortality and morbidity in elderly people suggesting a need for routine antibiotic treatment in these patients.

Jack Morrison White, formerly Consultant Psychiatrist, Stanley Royd Hospital, Wakefield

Dr J. M. White, for many years consultant psychiatrist at Stanley Royd Hospital, Wakefield, and St James's Hospital, Leeds, died recently.

Evaluation in Drama Therapy

Roger Grainger is an ex-actor but now chaplain and dramatherapist at Stanley Royd Hospital in Wakefield. He is also on the Executive Committee of the British Association for Dramatherapists and has been researching into “Dramatherapy and thought disorder”.

Lessons from the outbreak of food poisoning at Stanley Royd Hospital: what are health authorities doing now?

The committee of inquiry into the outbreak of food poisoning at Stanley Royd Hospital identified serious deficiencies in the management of the outbreak and urged all health authorities to learn from the incident and prepare adequate plans for dealing with any future outbreaks. A survey of district health authorities in England showed that most authorities do not yet have a written plan or that their plans are incomplete and inadequate. The appreciable resistance to such planning suggests that most health authorities would be unable to deal with outbreaks of food poisoning effectively and efficiently.

Signs of Tory political virility

The dust had only just settled last week after the government's shock second reading defeat on the Shops Bill when the detectable stirrings of another backbench Tory revolt could be seen at Westminster. It will not be as cataclysmic in its consequences as the Sunday trading reversal; in fact, the government will hardly notice it. But there is a mood of militancy among Conservative back? benchers that has sent many of them in search of an issue on which they can rebel. To digress slightly, it was precisely this sort of eventuality about which former Cabinet minister Francis Pym warned during the last general election campaign. As the Labour vote disintegrated before the nation's eyes he began to express concern that the government could win a massive Commons majority. As a former chief whip and leader of the House, he was keenly aware of the trouble that that could bring; when the chips are down and a government is clinging to a small majority MPs think long and hard about walking through the division lobbies with the Opposition, and then don't. But when a government is cushioned by the 140 vote margin enjoyed by Mrs Thatcher MPs can indulge themselves in the luxury of defying their whips. It may, and invariably will, mean that they can whistle goodbye to a job in the administration, but with so many backbenchers, and competition for posts so intense, there is little chance of getting one anyway. But the prophecies of the seer Pym are now being realised; even he probably did not conceive of the government actually losing a Bill on its second reading, an almost unheard of setback. No such fate is likely to befall the latest blockbuster legislation to emerge from the DHSS, the National Health Service (Amendment) Bill. The main reason is that it is supported by the Opposition, so the votes are in the bag. But the aforementioned Conservative awkward squad is already beginning to flex its muscles over one provision in the complex Bill, which was ostensibly the wherewithal to remove crown immunity enjoyed by NHS hospitals in the wake of the food poisoning outbreak at the Stanley Royd Hospital. Ministers found themselves with an extremely timely and useful method of introducing two other legislative changes, which had been outstanding for months and for which a parliamentary slot could not be found (at that stage they did not realise that a huge gap was about to open up in the programme with the disappearance of the Shops Bill). These were, firstly, to introduce the new pharmacists' contract, which had been successfully challenged in the courts last year and eventually withdrawn after the House of Lords had rejected its implementation in Scotland alone; and, secondly, to clarify the mechanism for correcting past payments to the four NHS con? tractor professions if they have been inadequate or excessive. Legislation introduced in 1984 to do just that was found to be deficient when two opticians organisations successfully challenged in the courts government attempts to recover ?11 million over reimbursed for NHS spectacles. During last week's second reading for the new Bill Health Minister Barney Hayhoe was in a generous mood. He pledged, think it is right the opticians should not be deprived of the fruits of their court victory and I give the clear undertaking on behalf of the government that no further attempt to recover the ?11 rnillion will be made. As an aside, he added: can also give the assurance that there is no intention whatsoever to change the current system for determin? ing the pay of medical and dental practitioners, which is based on the recommendations of their independent review body. He did not, by the way, say when it would report this year, but on past precedent the professions will have to wait until the middle of May to hear the bad news. So the new Bill is a many tendrilled thing, and much of it found favour on both sides of the House.

Defending 19 deaths from food poisoning

The government is facing virtually irresistible political pressure to remove the crown immunity enjoyed by National Health Service hospitals. The scandal uncovered by the inquiry into the food poisoning outbreak at the Stanley Royd psychiatric hospital in Wakefield (p 348) has added new momentum to a campaign that was already in full swing at Westminster. Ironically, the inspectors, who took more than a year to complete their report, are adamant that in the case of Stanley Royd the evidence did not support the need for the abolition of crown immunity. All the environmental health officers questioned by the inquiry team agreed that the conditions at the hospital, though sometimes far from ideal, at no time would have justified a prosecution under the food and drugs legislation. Nevertheless, in the months to come, members of parliament will cite the tragedy in Wakefield as proof of the urgent need to abolish crown immunity. Conservative backbencher Mr Richard Shepherd, the member for Hereford, is soon to launch a private Bill in the Commons, which would make those employed in kitchens on crown premises subject to the health and safety laws. His supporters acknowledge the inquiry team's opinion that crown immunity did not contribute to the food poisoning at Stanley Royd hospital; but they believe strongly that this does not affect the principle of the matter. Indeed, the Wakefield outbreak, in which 19 people died and a total of 355 patients and 106 members of staff were affected, was the most extreme consequence of a general level of hygiene in NHS hospital kitchens that seems to be nothing short of scandalous. The inquiry team referred to comments made frequently to us that the Institute of Environmental Health Officers regarded many hospital kitchens throughout the country as being unsatisfactory, a view publicly reiterated many times since our hearings concluded. Stripped of the ultimate sanction of bringing criminal charges against crown servants, the health officers regard themselves as visitors and advisers. The government, not wishing to abolish crown immunity for a variety of reasons, wants hospitals to act on this advice to bring their kitchens up to acceptable hygiene standards without recourse to the law. The report, however, seems to question this approach; the inquiry team uncovered a difference between the way that health inspectors carry out their duties on hospital premises compared with other establishments. This difference is difficult to define but was appreciated by all the officers who gave evidence before us. The only reason that we were able to discern for this difference was that the environmental