Book review: Proper People: Early Asylum Life in the Words of Those Who Were There
★ ★ ★ ★
This text is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of psychiatric care. It covers the period 1818-1869, taking us through the biographies of mentally ill patients in Yorkshire’s West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum in Wakefield.
By means of a survey of many sources – case files, chaplains journals and discharge books, council archives and medical museums – the narrative takes us into the world of hospitalised 19th century patients and those who attended them.
Pages 149-152 tell of Mary Tinker, a 37-year old housewife admitted in 1843: ‘wild, rude and unceremonious’.
Discharged in 1845 she is readmitted in 1846. From 1848, there is a 14-year gap in her notes and, by 1875, there is recorded ‘little change’. Finally discharged in 1877, after 32 years of asylum care, we see Mary’s photograph: featureless but for her pale skin
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