ABSTRACT
I n the history of psychiatry those who have worked in mental hospitals have often been marginalized. For the psychiatric profession, it is the nineteenth century that has attracted most attention.1 Andrew Scull has argued that Medical Superintendents dominated the asylum by 1900, allowing the institution to become the basis of their authority. The psychiatrist John Crammer has alternatively asserted that a psychiatric profession did not emerge until the twentieth century.2 Certainly by the late nineteenth century, doctors controlled the asylum and had their own professional organization, the Medico-Psychological Association (MPA), and journal, the Journal of Mental Science. Psychiatrists, however, continued to lag behind the rest of the medical profession and many of the trappings of professionalization were acquired after 1900.3 Few historians have turned their attention to these issues, and Medical Superintendents and leaders in the field dominate accounts. Little has been said about the twentieth century in general, the employment of women, or those who did most of the clinical work.4 Even less attention has been paid to the role of the mental nurse.5 It was first noted in 1960 that the history of mental nursing had been neglected and this was repeated in 1980 and 1996.6 One historian who has addressed this question has suggested that a society that isolated the mentally ill also inevitably marginalized those who cared for them. He went on to argue that 'the men and women who nurse the mentally disturbed seldom achieve public attention except as a result of scandal or a case of alleged ill treatment'.7 However, mental nurses were the backbone of the institution. Where they possessed little power to determine how the asylum was run, they did exercise considerable influence over the patients' lives. Here more attention has been paid at Bethlem with the publication of David Russell's Scenes from Bedlam.8 He deals with nursing in the Hospital from 1247 to the twentieth century, providing much useful information in a neglected field.
