Guest post by museum studies student Tiffany

Hello everyone, my name is Tiffany and I am originally from Hong Kong. As part of my master’s in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, I have the incredible opportunity to spend 8 weeks as placement at two of the best medical museums: the George Marshall Medical Museum and the Infirmary Museum. I am now halfway through my placement, and I am excited to share some of my work and insights with you.

Like many Museum Studies student, my academic background is in history. My undergraudate degree was in China Studies, major in history. Since secondary school, I have been fascinated by history, so I choose “World history” and Chinese history as my electives (Similar to GCSE or A-Level), which led me to pursue history throughout my education. However, the curriculum in Hong Kong takes a broad and chronological approach, so my knowledge of medical history was limited. To be honest, before this placement, I had a bias that medical history would be dull and difficult to understand. While I found half of it correct after the four weeks I spend here, it is really complicated yet very interesting and fascinating once you dive deeper!

My work at the two museum share similar goals but different focuses. At the George Marshall Medical Museum, my primary role is to develop educational materials for school groups and families, particularly for students preparing for their GCSE exam. This has given me an extraordinary opportunity to better understand the British education system and its curriculum. It is a solid foundation that gives me the freedom to be creative and add engaging elements to make our workshops more interactive. My goal is to not only engage students with the museum collection but also with the learning process itself.

At the Infirmary Museum, I have had the honour of participating in the renewal of objects for the current exhibition. Through archival and collection research, I have discovered many precious and compelling objects that are waiting to be showcased and shine in the display cases. The research is ongoing, so please stay tuned! I also wrote two captions for the Powick display using archives and photos to highlight a more positive side of the asylum. We hope this will challenge common perceptions of asylum as simply “Cruel” and “Inhumane”.

There are four more weeks to go and I look forward to sharing more of my journey with you!

Nursing Stories

Members of the Worcester Royal Infirmary Nurses’ League are invited to tell their stories of hospital life in Worcester to students of Acting, Theatre and Performance at the University of Worcester.

Please email Alison Reeves to let us know if you would like to take part and which day you would like to come.

3. OUTSIDE THE ASYLUM - GUEST BLOG BY MADDIE HALE

We’ve been busy at work on the Outside the Asylum project. Having focused first on researching the patients at the asylum, I have now been spending time looking at the collection. I’ve been choosing various items related to Powick Asylum or mental health care in general, in order to give a picture of what patients’ experiences were like, as the lives of the patients are often obscured in historical narratives of lunatic asylums. Whilst the point of the project is to give an idea of the patients’ lives ‘Outside the Asylum’, I think that bringing light to the day-to-day lives of those in the asylum helps to represent them as people, rather than as just as numbers in a register.

There are lots of fascinating items that have been chosen, and you’ll get to see all of them at the end of the project in a month or so, including several things that were used at Powick Lunatic Asylum. We’ve spent this week having the items photographed professionally, so that they will be available for view online. In the coming weeks I’ll be getting the museum display sorted, that will sit inside the Charles Hastings Education Centre.

More updates to come, but here’s a little sneak peek of some keys from one of the female wards of the asylum. Photography by Luke Unsworth.

This project has been supported by public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

2. OUTSIDE THE ASYLUM - GUEST BLOG BY MADDIE HALE

Whilst researching a patient by the name of Amelia Grice (nee Duff), I came across something interesting about her children and grandchildren. Amelia was born in 1844, and was at Powick between 1896 and 1903. She married Joseph Grice in 1868, and they had two children, Arthur Ernest Grice (born 1869) and Josephine Milly Grice (born 1871).

Her son Arthur married Edith Maria Livermore in 1895, but unfortunately, she passed away less than a year later. He remarried in 1921, this time to Isobel Madeleine Glanville Richards, but continued to support his mother-in-law, Ellen Livermore. Whilst researching Isobel’s family, I found that her father William Urmston Searle Glanville Richards was the author of a volume entitled Records of the Anglo-Norman House of Glanville from A.D. 1050 to 1880. William was imprisoned at Pentonville Prison for two months in 1891 for ‘maliciously damaging certain manuscripts kept in the British Museum’. This was reported on in the Pall Mall Gazette, on 12 March, 1891, and a record of the crime is available via the Old Bailey Proceedings website.

Amelia’s daughter Josephine Milly Grice married Alfred Ernest Lechmere Lycett in 1893, in Solihull. Josephine gave birth to Cyril Vernon Lechmere Lycett on 14 May, 1893. Cyril attended King Edward’s High School in Birmingham. His obituary was published in the King Edward’s school’s newsletter, The Old Edwardians Gazette in October of 1978. It stated that he was the youngest boy ever to be admitted to the school, and that author J.R.R. Tolkien was in his class. Interestingly, Cyril was mentioned in the letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. In a letter to a friend, Tolkien refers to a letter he received from ‘none other from C.V.L. Lycett, and from Los Angeles!’ writing that it was ‘full of reminiscences of K[ing] E[dward’s] S[chool]’. Cyril later attended Trinity College, at Cambridge, where he was a member of the rowing club. In 1914, he joined the Royal Engineers Special Reserve with an interest in cryptography, and from thereon, had a long-running career in the military. Whilst serving in what is now Istanbul, Türkiye, Cyril married Alexandra Sandika Camariotto in Turkey in 1921. Following his retirement, Cyril was Secretary of the Royal Horticultural Society. He died in Anaheim, California, on 8 June, 1978.

Whilst the aim of the project is to tell the stories of the patients outside of the asylum, it has been really fascinating to find some interesting stories about their relatives. More to come!

Maddie Hale, 2025

This project has been supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.