Cabinet of Curiosities
On this page you can find out more about the RCPsych's Cabinet of Curiosities, which illuminates the history of psychiatry and psychiatrists through a changing display of objects.
In this new venture we plan to display one object each month relating to the history of psychiatry and psychiatrists.
We are beginning by exhibiting items belonging to the RCPsych but in due course hope also to display loan items.
Manchester, c.1960
Dr Kitching influenced the design of the pioneering general hospital psychiatric unit (inpatient / outpatient / teaching) at Withington, but he died in 1968, before it opened.
Provenance: salvaged from an office waste-paper bin by a trainee psychiatrist at Withington Hospital, c.1990; donated to RCPsych 2024
Further information on Dr Kitching: see Royal College of Physicians ‘Inspiring Physicians’
If you have additional information about this object please email Claire Hilton, honorary.archivist@rcpsych.ac.uk
Invented in the early 1980s, the first 3½ inch floppy discs each stored about 300KB. In 1986, IBM introduced one that featured 1.44 MB within a plastic case, a format that became the mainstay of computing in the 1990s.
More than 5 billion floppy disks were sold annually at their peak in the mid-1990s. Most desktop and laptop computers were supplied with a floppy disk drive until 2005 when floppy disk drives were abandoned in favour of USB ports.
This defunct format is memorialised in the save icon but would you be able to access the information on one?
This raises the question of how we preserve digital information through the trials of format and device obsolescence, just as traditional records have been preserved for us on paper and parchment.
This floppy disc contains the manuscript of the book Psychotherapy of Psychosis (1997) and comes from the records of the College’s publications team. The editors worked for the NHS and must have saved it on one of their floppy discs before submitting it for editing.
This strange object contains glass, sand and a small metal antenna contained in an aluminium shell. It is inactive: it has no crystals and no radio or radioactive components.
It was offered for sale by the king of mail-order psychology scams ‘Professor’ Elmer Knowles (a.k.a. Elmer S. Prather), as part of his correspondence course in hypnotism and suggestion.
It was supposed to be used to focus the mind to facilitate auto-suggestion, hypnotism and distance healing. Prather and his wife ran a highly lucrative mail-order business for 50 years (1890-1940), regularly moving countries to avoid the authorities.
Loaned by Dr Gordon Bates, the College’s Historian in Residence from his personal collection. Originally sourced from eBay.
Hermann Rorschach (1884-1922) was neither the first nor the last to devise inkblots as a psychological tool, but his work is perhaps the most well-known. One person inspired by Rorschach’s work was Wilfred Alwyn Cassell (1934-2023) in the USA. He became interested in inkblots for understanding body image disorders while a resident psychiatrist. He devised the Somatic Inkblot Series, with 30 images (published 1960), and enlarged to 62 images (1980) – on display here.
The Somatic Inkblot Society was founded in India in 1989. Since 1994 it has published the peer-reviewed Journal of Projective Psychology and Mental Health, broadly concerned with research into projective psychology, personality assessment and psychotherapy and the development of inkblot tests.
Provenance: From the College Library, donated by Professor Gerald Libby on behalf of the family of Professor Linford Rees (1914-2004). Professor Rees was President of the College between 1975 and 1978.
Seven-plank mineral waggon belonging to Napsbury Mental Hospital Management Committee. Scale: 1:76, ‘OO’ gauge. Model manufactured by Oxford Diecast Ltd.
Before mains gas and electricity supplies became available, mental hospitals used coal fires for heating, and they produced some gas and electricity in their own generating plants. Napsbury Mental Hospital, Hertfordshire, received its coal deliveries by train via a single-track railway siding going right into the centre of the hospital.
Dr Dora Black (1932-2021) spoke in 2019 about one of her patients at Napsbury in the late 1950s, ‘found dead on that railway track….nobody was sure whether she’d deliberately gone and killed herself or whether she’d had an epileptic fit….I never really knew what happened. And I always wondered if I should have given her permission to go out….I’ve remembered it for…sixty years.’
It is a salutary tale: suicide is a tragedy for the individual and emotionally traumatic for the bereaved family and friends, and for staff, and its memory can last a lifetime.
Provenance: On loan from Dr Claire Hilton, Honorary Archivist.
Would you like your malaria by infected blood injection or directly from the mosquito?
From the 1920s, malaria was used to treat ‘general paralysis of the insane’ (GPI), a late manifestation of the sexually transmitted disease syphilis which affected the brain. Malaria would give the patient high fevers which could kill the bacteria which caused GPI.
Malaria-carrying mosquitoes were transferred into the jar which was positioned on the patient’s skin so that the mosquitoes could bite through the netting and infect the patient. It was a desperate remedy for a desperate, fatal disease, but until the advent of antibiotics (1940s), it was the only option.
While today it sounds like something from early sci-fi, malarial treatment saved lives and left many positive legacies in mental health care, such as demonstrating some mental illnesses had biological causes and that mental hospitals needed on-site laboratories and better diagnostic and treatment facilities.
Provenance: On loan from Dr Claire Hilton, Honorary Archivist.
The Towers opened as Leicester Borough Lunatic Asylum in 1869. It was later renamed Leicester City Mental Hospital, and finally Towers Hospital under the NHS in 1948. The inpatient beds closed in 2000 and the site ceased as a hospital in 2013. The principal ranges are now Grade II listed. Part of the buildings are now a Sikh free school and the rest has been redeveloped for residential use.
This plate is from the mid-20th century and bears the hospital’s crest. The hard wearing material and monogram was typical of the tableware ordered by many British hospitals, in order to standardise catering, survive hard use, deter walk-abouts, and signal institutional identity. It was found among odd crockery in the doctors’ quarters when Dr Maloney worked as a resident in the 1980s.
Provenance: on loan from Dr Chris Maloney.
