ABSTRACT
Psychiatric patients confi ned in hospitals for the insane in the nineteenth century ate ‘cold greasy food’ from simple bowls, served from a tin container.1 They wore shapeless clothing of blue and white galatea, and when they were able to adorn it with more decoration, for formal occasions, they did so.2 Some patients who exhibited violent or harmful behaviours were restrained by camisoles or straitjackets, and others were cuffed using strong, leather wrist or ankle shackles. Inmates who were placed in seclusion were also reputedly very strong and often scratched words and symbols into the painted walls of their cells. Words written about these inmates were entered into large, leather-bound folios by attendants and medical staff. Much of this physical evidence of the lives of psychiatric patients survives in collections of material culture-collections of ‘stuff’ from the lived worlds of the confi ned-which contain objects from the late nineteenth century into the middle of the twentieth century. There are many such collections of objects around the world; they retain a haunting signifi cance to all those touched by the histories of mental illness, and provide lingering reminders of the sometimes frightening histories of mental hospitals, treatments and abuses of hospital inmates, and the dull daily routines of institutional life. This chapter considers these material remnants of past psychiatry through a close examination of three specifi c collections, but with reference to wider, ongoing practices of psychiatric collecting and display.
