You may have seen that over the last sixth months or so, we have been working on the Outside the Asylum project, funded by the National Lottery via Arts Council England. Almost forty patients have now been researched by staff and volunteers, with more on the way, and these are available for you to view on the website. The aim of this project has been, as the name suggests, to find out more about the patients as people, outside of the asylum, and the research done so far has brought to life so many people long forgotten to history. More than 9,000 patient case notes are available for you to search and browse via the online database.
Alongside patient research, I was able to choose some artefacts from the collection at the George Marshall Medical Museum to be photographed and researched, in order to illustrate the experiences of patients at the asylum. The typical narrative of lunatic asylums has been a large-scale one, looking at the buildings or the doctors and medical staff that worked there. An understanding of how mental illness was understood and the day-to-day lives of the patients themselves has often been ignored, and a number of objects were chosen from the collection to illuminate the everyday experiences of people who were admitted to the asylum; things as simple as what they had to eat every day and how they kept busy.
The Outside the Asylum page is now completed and ready for view, alongside an in-person display at the George Marshall Medical Museum, including some of the objects that have been chosen for the website. The project has been the result of lots and lots of hard work by the team of volunteers and curator Louise Price, and we would absolutely love for you to come and visit the museum, to learn more about the people behind the patient numbers.
