History of Psychiatry at Glenside Hospital Museum

This year’s autumn face-to-face meeting will be at  Glenside Hospital Museum in Bristol, on the UWE Glenside Campus (BS16 1DD) which occupies the old Bristol Lunatic Asylum opened in 1863. 

We were there eight years ago, but this time we will hold the meeting at the museum itself.

The museum has operated for over 30 years on a shoestring budget, run by volunteers with no professional curators. It is quirky! It is, however, probably the largest collection of displayed asylum artefacts and the largest dedicated psychiatric museum exhibition space in the country, with exhibits that range from ward life, to outdoor work, ECT, restraint and secretarial work. It has the work of Denis Reed, who drew his fellow patients and staff whilst an inpatient in the 1950s.

Based in the 1880s chapel built for the asylum, it houses a wide range of artefacts – mainly from the 1950s but many unchanged since the Victorian period. There are sections on its life as a World War One war hospital, as well as the local intellectual disability hospitals and the Burden Neurological Institute. 

There is a wide variety of accommodation in central Bristol.  Getting to the museum from the centre is either a bus and 15 15-minute walk or a taxi. We are also arranging parking on site. Uber operate in Bristol. Staying overnight will enable you to visit the Red Lodge Museum on Park Row in central Bristol where J C Prichard lived.

The talks this time have a Bristol theme with a talk on the Industrial Therapy Organisation, which made Glenside a national name. Stella Man is the project lead at Glenside and recently co-led a research project on ITO.

Margaret Crump has recently published the definitive biography on James Cowles Prichard and is talking about her research.

Unfortunately Paul Cheshire has had to withdraw, and Peter Carpenter will be talking on the ‘Lady of the Haystacks’, who was placed in Henderson’s Asylum in Bristol, which itself has links to the romantic poets and the Wesleys. He has made an extensive, but unpublished study of the lady and the Hendersons.

As a new new speaker we have Dr Stephen Mawdsley, Senior Lecturer in the University of Bristol Department of History, he has been closely involved with the Bristol Medico-Historical society - as is speaking on one os his studies on the little known toxic consequences of Prohibition. 

Paul Tobia is a local researcher and volunteer who obtained his degree looking at the case records and photographs for Glenside. 

Beatriz Pichel is leading a research project developing the ethics for using old images in research, which will be important to anyone using old images in their publications. We will be talking about examples to provoke debate – in asylum imagery and films of those with a learning disability.

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