Mental hospital archives open door to study of a hidden Ireland
Liam Kenny
A dramatic heading “Mad Man Runs Amok in Naas” headlined a report in the local press of a bizarre incident which took place in Naas in November 1907. A man, described as being a small farmer from the Ballymore Eustace area, ran amok in the town breaking a window of a licensed premises in Poplar Square with his “naked hand” after he had been refused drink. He proceeded to break some other windows in the street. The constabulary arrived and succeeded in calming him. Dr Murphy was called to examine him but the man suddenly turned and attacked the doctor. The constables managed to restrain him again and took him before the magistrates who committed him to “the Carlow District Lunatic Asylum as a dangerous lunatic.”
This is just one of the many mentions of the Carlow asylum – known in later years as St Dympna’s hospital — in the local press over the years. Kildare never had its own asylum and all patients – most who presented in a less dramatic way than our farmer friend – were committed to the Carlow asylum. This remoteness from the county might go some way in explaining how the relationship between Kildare and the psychiatric hospital to which local patients were committed has never been analysed by local historians. Probably the main contributor to such a gap in the coverage of social history in the county was the lack of records available with the perception being that asylum records were treated so sensitively that they would never be opened for public research.
That situation is about to change with the handover by the Health Services Executive of the records of the Carlow Asylum to the Delany Archive which is housed in Carlow College and which maintains the archives for the diocese of Kildare & Leighlin.
The newly arrived asylum records reveals vital information of what has been often a hidden facet of Irish society. For example an 1862 report on the asylum provides a useful profile of patients and types of illness that led to their admission. Of 205 patients, 79 are described as belonging to the agricultural class; 29 to the servant classes; 12 are clerks and shop assistants; six are soldiers; and three are members of the Royal Irish Constabulary. Illnesses are described as mania, monomania, melancholia, dementia, and epilepsy complicated with mania. Many writers on the history of mental illness have found it difficult to reconcile nineteenth-century diagnoses with the terminology used today. Some of the causes of mental illness given in the report are grief, love, fright, jealousy, loss of property, religious fervour and excess of study. Between 1832-1922, there were 5,517 admissions to the Asylum and men accounted for 55% of this number. While there were some long-stay patients, most spent less than six months in the Asylum. The archive contains various registers of patients, containing biographical and medical information, and these records are expected to be of great interest to family, medical and social historians. Due to the sensitive nature of these records, some access conditions apply. Generally, patient records become available 100 years after date of admission.
During the early years, patient care was shared by the Asylum’s manager and visiting physician. Patients were primarily treated using an approach known as ‘moral management,’ rather than one based on medical principles. Moral management was based on kindness and understanding and it encouraged recreation, religious observance, work and a good quality diet as aids to recovery. The types of work assigned to male patients included agricultural work and gardening, trades and housework, while females participated in sewing, knitting, quilting and housework. The ordinary diet was heavily based on carbohydrates and changed little during the nineteenth century after the Famine, when potatoes were substituted by other foods. An 1861 report gives the ordinary diet as: breakfast – 8 ounces of oatmeal in stirabout, with ⅓ quart of new milk; dinner – males, 11 ounces of bread, with a quart of good soup, or a pint of mixed milk; females – 8 ounces of bread; same soup or milk; supper – 8 ounces of bread with a pint of cocoa. While moral management marked a huge step forward in the treatment of the mentally ill, it was difficult to operate due to the large numbers in asylums.
The Asylum was designed by government architect, William Murray, to accommodate 104 patients but Ireland had high levels of asylum admission and almost from the beginning accommodation was not adequate to meet applications for admission. By 1871, The Asylum could cater for 178 patients, and for 426 patients by 1896. In 1911, it was reported that the asylum had housed more than 500 patients for some years. Overcrowding exacerbated illness and there are references in the records of outbreaks of influenza, cholera and dysentery. In 1870, and again in 1899, the Kildare local authorities made an abortive attempt to have an asylum opened in the county. The Kildare authorities were frustrated by the fact that Kildare ratepayers supported the Asylum but they had difficulty having patients admitted. Until 1874, day-to-day running costs were funded solely by the county cess, a tax payable to the local grand jury, when a government grant-in-aid of 4 shillings per patient per week was introduced. Originally asylums were to accommodate paupers only; there was no provision for paying patients who were accommodated in a small network of privately run asylums.
The asylum archive is available for research, and a catalogue of the content of the archive has been published at www.delanyarchive.ie. Further information about the archive is available from Bernie Deasy, Delany Archive, Carlow College. Tel: 059 9153200 and email: delanyarchive@carlowcollege.ie
Dr Catherine Cox, School of History & Archives, UCD, and author of Negotiating Insanity in the Southeast of Ireland 1820-1900 will give a lecture at Carlow College on Monday, 15 December 2014, at 1.45pm. Admission is free of charge and all are welcome. Leinster Leader 2 December 2014, Looking Back, Series no: 410.
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