All speakers are very enthusiastic about their topic and are happy to answer questions. Talks last between 45-90 minutes and are subject to the speaker's availability. Speakers can come to your venue, or you can come to us and also enjoy a visit to the museum.
Please email Louise Price for details and fees (louise.price10@nhs.net).
sarah dentith speaks about local medical history and archives, including the former worcester infirmary
Any fee charged is given as a donation to the George Marshall Medical Museum
WAR WORRY: HOW THE FIRST WORLD WAR AFFECTED PATIENTS OF A MENTAL HOSPITAL
Sarah Dentith talks about the female and the male patients discovered in original records held at the Worcestershire Archive and Archaeology Service at the Hive in Worcester. The patient casebooks have rarely been accessed since the information is protected by the 100 year rule and additional legislation designed to protect the identity of vulnerable people. However, Sarah tells the stories of some of the patients at Powick during the war, the woman who attacked her neighbour, another who liked to undress, a man who believed he was an opera singer and another who escaped. She talks about those local men who were so worried about the war it affected their delusions, and those soldiers who hadn't finished basic training but told heroic stories of winning medals in France. She recreates the lives of lost people and talks about their experience as staff tried to help them with occupational therapy and medicines in a time when the mentally ill have hardly been studied yet.
why did they pay for the hospital?
This talk looks at the great and the good of Worcester, who funded the Infirmary but it also looks at economic change at the turn of the twentieth century when middle class women were gaining a little freedom in the charities they supported and working class men could fund their own medical expenses before the National Insurance Act. Sarah Dentith’s award-winning undergraduate dissertation was about the history of Worcester Infirmary, looking at the people that funded it at the end of the Victorian Period and why.
how they built a dispensary
Based on her own family research this talk concentrates on Worcester Dispensary built by her great x3 grandfather. It includes information and tips on family history, the history of dispensaries and the controversies over financing medical institutions, all despite a shortage of original sources on this particular topic.
KEN CRUMP RMN speaks PASSIONATELY ABOUT THE FORMER POWICK MENTAL ASYLUM
Any fee charged is given as a donation to the George Marshall Medical Museum
THE POWICK EXPERIENCE
Ken Crump RMN speaks passionately about his time at Powick Hospital between 1963 and 1989. As Student Nurse and later Staff Nurse and Charge Nurse, his illustrated talk covers the staff, the hospital environment and its function until the hospital closed.
mrs Louise Robinson BSc (hons) gives talks about various medical history topics, with a nod to some items in the museum’s collections.
19th century surgery
Join Louise Robinson BSc (Hons) Anatomical Studies, on a journey of discovery through 19th-century operating theatre practice, from a time before anaesthesia and antisepsis.
Death masks and phrenology
A fascinating talk about the history of Phrenology and the George Marshall Medical Museum’s collection of death masks.
dr mark gallagher (phd) is an historian of medicine, with an interest in histories of psychiatry, madness and psychotropic drugs.
Mark welcomes requests from interested groups and organisations to deliver online talks. He may also able to offer lectures at the George Marshall Medical Museum, depending on availability. His research has focused on twentieth-century histories of psychiatry, the radical Scottish psychiatrist Dr R.D. Laing, collective action by psychiatric patients and LSD psychotherapy. He has explored the archives of Dr Ronald Sandison, who was the first psychiatrist in the UK to treat patients with LSD. Sandison pioneered LSD psychotherapy at Powick Hospital, Worcestershire, where he was Deputy Medical Superintendent, between 1952 and 1964. Mark offers presentations on various aspects of the histories of LSD, Powick Hospital and Ronald Sandison, including, but not limited to, the following topics:
The Birth of the LSD Clinic: Putting Post-War Powick in Global Context
Currently there is a ‘psychedelic renaissance’ underway. Once again, medics and scientists are probing the effects and clinical applications of compounds such as psilocybin (magic mushrooms) and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). Yet, the story of the birth of the LSD clinic in the U.K. over 70 years ago is still shrouded in mystery. This talk explores the key part that Powick Hospital played in launching LSD on the global stage and why, paradoxically, its paradigmatic role in the emergence of LSD psychotherapy went under the radar.
The Theory and Practice of LSD Therapy at Powick Hospital
This talk explores how LSD therapy was theorised and practised at Powick Hospital by presenting a close reading of the different perspectives of mid-twentieth-century practitioners of the experimental psychiatric treatment. It is revealed that the major European paradigm of psycholytic (mind-loosening) therapy was initiated at Powick and spread through the complementary and competing approaches of LSD therapists from within and beyond the hospital.
The Social Revolution at Powick as Prelude to the Pharmacological Turn
When a new leadership was installed at Powick Hospital in the 1950s the one-hundred-year-old institution was in a dilapidated state. This talk investigates the background of its transformation in the following decades, from its ‘slum status’, to its role as national and international test-bed for new approaches in psychological medicine and mental health service provision.
Mercia and the Many Dimensions of LSD: Mapping the Dream Territory of Worcestershire
Why was Worcestershire the birthplace of LSD therapy in the United Kingdom? On the face of it, the emergence of LSD therapy was the result of a combination of chance events and new scientific and medical discoveries. At a deeper level it was shaped by traditions of dream journeying and mythmaking. By quarrying its richly layered cultural pre-history and afterlife, a deep topography of the subterranean landscape is unearthed, a ‘land of lost content’, revealing resonances between medical, literary and musical voices in the Worcestershire border country. By drawing analogies between visions of LSD at Powick, and works of poetry, music and drama, such as Piers Plowman, The Dream of Gerontius and Penda’s Fen, we see more clearly why Dr Ronald Sandison thought LSD was a ‘philosopher’s stone of many dimensions’, and a ‘match made in Heaven’, when he and the strange new substance fetched up in Mercia.
All speakers are very enthusiastic about their topic and are happy to answer questions. Talks last between 45-90 minutes and are subject to the speaker's availability. Speakers can come to your venue, or you can come to us and also enjoy a visit to the museum.
Please email Louise Price for details and fees (louise.price10@nhs.net).