http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/30/arts/design/chains-whips-and-misery-studying-and-preserving-old-lunatic-asylums.html 2016-09-29 22:38:57 Chains, Whips and Misery: Studying and Preserving Old ‘Lunatic’ Asylums Several exhibitions and books, including “Bedlam: The Asylum and Beyond” at the Wellcome Collection in London, document the terrors experienced by patients. === Mental hospitals have an unsettling history, which is the subject of many museum exhibitions and books this fall. The scholarship illuminates how for centuries reformers tried to prevent cruel treatment of the mentally ill and worked to develop architecture that would provide comfort while keeping patients away from the public. Historians and preservationists are trying to save the isolated buildings that resulted from these efforts and are poring over sometimes-forgotten archives. “Bedlam: The Asylum and Beyond,” an At the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, “a letter from the king was enough to confine anyone for life without right of appeal,” Painters and photographers visited as well. The Wellcome show and book include portraits of disheveled inmates from the 18th and 19th centuries, by the British artists Thomas Rowlandson and William Hogarth, and the French painter Théodore Géricault. (Photographs of French patients are the subject of a recent The show and book feature works by artists who were patients, including van Gogh; they sometimes created portraits of their physicians, a sampling of which are in the show and the book. James Tilly Matthews, a tea merchant and artist who was deemed incurably insane, sketched proposals in the 1810s for airy hospitals where the mentally ill would tend to vegetable gardens and help with chores. (Mr. Jay wrote about him in a The Wellcome show’s 20th-century sections feature creepy-looking electrical machines that emitted voltage believed to have therapeutic value. The artifacts come from the Wellcome collection and other institutions, including the Historians who focus on treatment of the mentally ill report that much documentation has been destroyed, sometimes by people trying to hide evidence of family illnesses. “The memories are not good memories,” Mr. Jay said in an interview. Diagnostic tests used to determine mental pathologies are the subject of “ Since the early 1900s, patients have been asked to manipulate and describe kits of blocks, dolls, photos and ink blots, as doctors and therapists watched for signs of psychiatric disorders. Mel Gooding, a critic who wrote commentaries for the book, said he remained skeptical of claims from test designers and manufacturers. In one “highly dubious test” from the 1930s, Mr. Gooding writes, the Hungarian psychiatrist Leopold Szondi asserted that he could determine patients’ maladies by examining their reactions to photos of people described as “homosexual, sadist, epileptic, hysteric, catatonic, paranoid, depressive and maniac.” But even the most sinister tests are still fascinating, Mr. Gooding said, because they relate to questions of “how do we think about ourselves, how do we interpret ourselves?” Museum exhibitions of materials used to diagnose and treat the mentally ill have been set up in, among other places, the Oregon State Hospital Next year the National Building Museum in Washington will present a Preservationists have been calling for other restorations and reuses of the often stigmatized 19th-century buildings, many of which have long corridors, airy rooms and large windows advocated by the Quaker physician Thomas Story Kirkbride. One of his descendants, the architect Mr. Kirkbride wrote the introduction for a new Mr. Kirkbride said that the hospitals, which have been abandoned and demolished by the dozens, were blamed for overcrowding and other flaws in mental health care. But the original architects of the building, he said, “really believed in providing a place for the placeless.”