Newsletter of the Royal College of Psychiatrists' History of Psychiatry Special Interest Group
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News and Notes Newsletter of the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ History of Psychiatry Special Interest Group Issue 10, Spring 2020 2 News and Notes History of Psychiatry Editors for this issue: Special Interest Claire Hilton Group and Mutahira Qureshi Issue 10, Spring 2020 Contents Stop Press! Sort it out but don’t throw it out! , Francis Maunze 3 Editorial, “A plague o’ both your houses”, Mutahira Qureshi 4 Report from the Chair, George Ikkos 7 Bethlem Museum of the Mind, virtual book club 9 RCPsych witness seminar: Psychiatric hospitals in the 1960s, Tom Stephenson 10 Nottingham Psychiatric Archive and other online resources 11 Out and about…. 11 Conference: HoPSIG and University of Newcastle, 17-18 September 2020 13 Libraries and donations: playing the long game, Fiona Watson 15 History articles Psychiatry in Africa, Femi Oyebode 18 Sigmund Freud and his critics, Michael Fitzgerald 22 History inspired Wedding cakes from Jason Holdcroft-Long 26 Memoir The hospital case conference and other learning experiences, RHS Mindham 27 Book review “We don’t know what we are looking for?” Reflections on New Horizons in Psychiatry by Peter Hays (1971), George Ikkos 29 Dates for your diary 36 3 Stop press! Sort it out but don’t throw it out! Francis Maunze, College Archivist In an attempt to follow government Covid-19 guidance and the need to maintain good mental wellbeing, we are aware that some of our members are trying to keep busy by sorting out their career-long paperwork. The College Archives is appealing to you to consider donating your historical records to the Archives rather than throwing them out. The College has an archives collection development policy. Its main purpose is to ensure that we collect, maintain, document and preserve the history of the College. The policy also allows the Archivist to collect personal papers of officers, fellows and members of the College. These papers usually supplement and compliment institutional records collected from the various departments, committees, faculties and other bodies of the College. The papers which are most likely to contain information of archival value include: diaries, memoirs, biographies; official correspondence; committee, faculty, section, group and division minutes, reports and files; correspondence with colleagues, professional organisations, government bodies; audio-visual records such as photographs, interviews, oral history tapes and transcripts. For assistance with the selection of material suitable for the Archives and for information on transfer arrangements, please contact: Francis Maunze, College Archivist: [email protected] tel: 0203 701 2539 or Dr Claire Hilton, Historian in Residence: [email protected] or Dr Graham Ash, Honorary Archivist: [email protected] 4 Editorial In the months leading up to this as the pandemic spread, hitting China, Iran and Italy the hardest, there has been a state of global pandemonium. We “A plague o’ both have seen scenes of fights over commodities, frenzied-emptying of supermarket shelves leaving your houses”! nothing for old or sick people, fuelled by so-called fake news and media-hype; evolving guidelines in the wake of piling casualties, and new research; deserted tourist haunts; conspiracy theories, and Mutahira Qureshi, co-editor governments to blame. Some have called it mass hysteria: a wave of [email protected] contagion, both the rapid transmission of the virus and the behaviour wreaking havoc on the established order of the world. With his dying breath, Shakespeare’s Mercutio It is a déjà vu, almost down to the minutiae of other utters the fateful curse “a plague o’ both your pandemics that have afflicted the human race houses”, on the houses of Montague and Capulet, throughout history. And even though the culprit echoing the medieval consciousness that invoking pathogens change – parasites to fungus to bacteria plague is perhaps the worst punishment to be to now the virus – the human response, both inflicted on mankind. Shakespeare echoes this physical and psychological, has remained much the numerous times in his plays, as characters wishing same. to be avenged call upon a contagion to wreak justice on their tormentors. A memorable example of this is Richard II’s invocation of wrath on the armies standing to dethrone him: “Yet know, my master, God omnipotent / Is mustering in his clouds on our behalf / Armies of pestilence.” In the tragic reality of our world finding itself in the middle of the COVID- 19 pandemic, the medieval consciousness and fear is perhaps now also our own. At the time of writing this, the pandemic has found a significant foothold in London. The A and E where I work as a liaison psychiatry doctor has been declared a Red Zone; schools are due to close; news tells us that military troops are on standby for a civil emergency; the city that prides itself for never sleeping has announced it will cancel night trains; and a complete lockdown is imminent. Doctors everywhere under the national guidance are Figure 1: “Bring Out your Dead”: A street during the 1665 Great on the alert: to be ever ready for a move to A and Es Plague in London with a death cart, by Edmund Evans (1826-1905). and acute settings irrespective of their usual clinical Note the deserted streets, and infected houses marked with a red specialties. cross. The inscription reads, The Lord have Mercie on this Hovse , echoing the sheer helplessness and the only remedy that Hence on behalf of them all, before delving into appeared efficacious to the people at the time. Wellcome some of the history around pandemics, I would like Collection, CCBY4.0 license to echo Galen and Hippocrates’ advice on plagues and say, Cito, Longe, Tarde. It is so effective it is almost a battle cry: Cito! Longe! Tarde! Fly quickly! Go far away (alone)! Return slowly (back)! Or as most of the junior doctors will put it these days: do not attend emergency if you don’t need to! In fact, don’t be out and about in crowded places if you don’t need to. And if symptomatic, self isolate promptly in line with Public Health England guidelines. So let’s rally together for mankind as a whole and cry to ourselves and strictly practice, Cito! Longe! Tarde! 5 diseased mixed with healthy people, like a fire through dry grass or oil it would rush upon the healthy...if I were not one of many people who saw it with their own eyes, I would scarcely have dared to believe it, let alone to write it down, even if I had heard it from a completely trustworthy person.” In terms of the psychological effects of the plague and the social-contagion that further accelerated the spread, Boccaccio’s contemporary Marchionne di Coppo Stefani wrote in Cronaca Fiorentina (“Florentine Chronicle”): “There was such a fear that no one seemed to know what to do….It was such a frightful thing that when it got into a house…frightened people abandoned the house and fled to another.” In Strasbourg in 1512, when the dancing fever seemed to grip the inhabitants of the city, what started as a likely infectious ailment of one woman turned into a psychic contagion and hysteria of the whole town, as they gathered in the town square to witness the inflicted, in turn catching their infection and panic alike. The situation was not helped by the town authorities who initially encouraged the people to do so, and went as far as hiring musicians to egg the crowd on, with the result that many died who Figure 2: Copper engraving of Doctor Schnabel, i.e. Dr. Beak, a plague should not have done. Eventually reason prevailed, doctor in 17th century Rome (c.1656). From Laurel (2018), public and the afflicted were taken inside monasteries and domain hospitals, isolated and treated. Boccaccio in The Decameron wrote of the year 1348 of his beloved city Florence during the Black Death: “To cure these infirmities neither the advice of physicians nor the power of medicine appeared to have any value or profit; perhaps either the nature of the disease did not allow for any cure or the ignorance of the physicians…did not know how to cure it.” Figure 4: Triumph of Death (Trionfo Della Morte) Wall Painting at Palazzo Abatellis, Palermo (painter unknown, c.1448). From Alberghina et al (2019). CCBY4.0 license As I finish writing this editorial the government has announced a lockdown and social distancing and self-isolation are now legally enforceable. We Figure 3: Citizens of Tournai bury Black Death plague victims. remember those who passed away in this pandemic Miniature from The Chronicles of Gilles Li Muisis (c. 1272–1352 . to date and we pray that these new measures will From Slack (2012). Public domain flatten the uphill curve of mortalities. He furthermore wrote, “But what gave this pestilence In other news, since the last issue, HoPSIG and the particularly severe force was that whenever the College archivist organised a Witness Seminar on psychiatric hospitals in the 1960s (see page 10). 6 HoPSIG also joined with the Royal Society of https://wellcomecollection.org/works/ynerdkf9 . Accessed March Medicine to organise a one-day conference Mind, 26, 2020. State and Society 1960-2010: Half a century of UK K Harrington, "Cito, longe, tarde: fly quickly, go far, return slowly”, The Repository, Royal Society, Blogs, 2015. Available: psychiatry and mental health . https://blogs.royalsociety.org/history-of- science/2015/03/09/great-plague/ [Accessed: 09 Mar 2020] On 17-18 September 2020 HoPSIG, in J Hays, Epidemics and Pandemics (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC- collaboration with the School of History, Classics CLIO, 2006) and Archaeology at Newcastle University, is R Horrox, The Black Death (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994) planning a two-day workshop Understanding Death R Kantor and L Green, Chronicles of the Tumult of the Ciompi and Mortality in the Context of Mental Illness and (Clayton, Vic.: Dept.