The Broadmoor Clinical Reference Library
12 February, 2025
by Fiona Watson, Library and Archives Manager.
Recently the College has been lucky enough to receive a donation of around 240 books that once formed the Clinical Reference Library at Broadmoor in Berkshire. Founded in 1863, Broadmoor is the oldest of England’s high security psychiatric hospitals. The books date from 1817 to 1973, with the majority having been published between 1910 and 1940.
Asylum for Criminal Lunatics, Broadmoor, Berkshire. Wellcome Collection. Source: Wellcome Collection.
While the College often receives offers of book donations, sadly space is limited and we cannot always accept. When we do, we only keep books not already present in our collections and relevant to psychiatry. However, in the case of this collection, it was decided that it was worth preserving in its entirety as a snapshot depicting medical knowledge and practice the time. As with all significant donations, we worked with Bernard Quaritch to get an accurate idea of the collection’s worth for insurance purposes. Assigning a value to rare objects is an interesting art, since all are in some sense irreplaceable. For example, if our newly donated copy of Handbook for Attendants on the Insane was to vanish in a fire, we could buy another but we could not buy another copy that was once used to treat patients in Broadmoor. We can, however, apply the value a book would likely sell for. This highlights an interesting paradox for the Broadmoor collection: collectors want books in as pristine a condition as possible, so a library stamp automatically lowers the value. But Broadmoor has a strange cultural cache, and a stamp indicating it belonged at Broadmoor will raise the value. Ironically most of our books are stamped as ‘The Board of Control’ making the provenance less obvious and the book less valuable.
Photos taken by Fiona Watson and used with permission.
Donations often come to us as a result of some sort of upheaval, whether that is a death, a move, or a refurbishment, either personal or institutional. The problem with this is that such upheavals make it easy to lose crucial information that contextualises a collection. For the Broadmoor donation, we weren’t in direct contact with either a librarian or medical director who could tell us about how it came to be and what it was used for. In the hope of filling in some blanks I reached out to Dr Harvey Gordon, fellow of the RCPsych who worked at Broadmoor nearly twenty years, including eight as Medical Director. He also wrote Broadmoor: An Inside Story.
Photos taken by Fiona Watson and used with permission.
He was able to tell me that the staff library from which our new books originate seems to have begun life as a collection of books on shelves in the medical superintendent’s office. These remained in place and expanded for over 100 years and the collection was only removed when the office of the medical director (which had replaced the medical superintendent role) came to end in 1989. This was typical for the time, after the 1983 Griffith’s Report highlighted the lack of a management class in the NHS as the root of some of its issues, with Griffith saying: “if Florence Nightingale was carrying her lamp through the corridors of the NHS today, she would almost certainly be searching for the people in charge”. Following the report, general managers began to be introduced, with one such taking possession of the office where the Broadmoor books had lived. In time, the General Manager became a Chief Executive with the Director of Medical Services still reporting into that role. Regardless of the title change, these people seem to have been less motivated to be surrounded by the medical literature!
Dr Gordon and others were invited to take what they wanted from the collection in around 2007. While 240 books have made it to the College, we can see from their spine labels that the Broadmoor Clinical Reference Library was once much larger, perhaps around 850 books. Dr Gordon took around 30 books and used them to write Broadmoor: An Inside Story. We hope he’ll donate these books to the College some day so that the collection can be reunited. We’d love to hear from anyone else who might be able to help us track down other missing volumes.
After 2007 our 240 books would have gone to one of two places: the Broadmoor hospital library or the Ealing Library. As Dr Gordon remembers the collection was mostly used by doctors and compiled by the senior doctors. Many books have the names of past owners on their fly leaves. If you have any memories of the Clinical Reference Library from your own time at Broadmoor, please let us know.
Photo taken by Fiona Watson and used with permission.
Photo taken by Fiona Watson and used with permission.
The collection is mostly what you would expect, academic works on mental health with some covering the intersection with the law and jurisprudence. There is more about children than I would have expected, and a fair amount of textbooks for nurses that confirm it wasn’t only doctors making use of the collection. What are more surprising are the very few instances of lighter reading:
Pure Gold: a Choice of Lyrics and Sonnets
The Springs of Laughter
The Subtle Knot
A Wanderer in Paris
Ill Met by Moonlight
There was a patient library at Broadmoor and it is possible these books jumped from the patient library to the staff library. There isn’t enough light reading here to indicate that leisure reading was being collected intentionally, perhaps rather that books drifted into the collection when staff left their own volumes lying around in the office. This is certainly what happens in the RCPsych! Any interesting books left unclaimed will fairly swiftly become part of the library! You have been warned.
