Under Browne’s ‘moral health’ regime, Crichton patients were stimulated by artistic and other cultural activities designed to alleviate, or potentially to cure, their mental distress. Browne, the first Physician Superintendent of Crichton Royal Institution in Dumfries 1838–57 (for accounts of Browne’s influence, see Park, 2010 Scull, Mackenzie and Hervey, 1996 Williams, 1996). Scotland holds a distinctive claim to the art of the insane in the collection of patient work amassed by Dr W.A.F. Using a set of patient artworks as the focus allows a different set of patient experiences to come to the fore, experiences currently lost or unheard in the stories of the insane to date. Focusing on artwork created by one individual in Scottish psychiatric care from 1901–50, attention is drawn to the personal and collective inhabitation of small spaces often neglected in the wider narratives of institutional life. In this vein, the present paper seeks to examine a Scottish collection of the art of the insane, labelled ‘Art Extraordinary’. While previous studies have focused almost exclusively on the written words of psychiatric patients from letters, novels or poems, a small but growing body of work is turning towards the ‘art of the insane’ to reveal the patient experience differently ( Beveridge and Williams, 2002 MacGregor, 1989).
Recent work on the nineteenth-century asylum system has sought to progress such debates by signalling the importance of exploring boundaries between history and narrative, fiction and fact in the telling of asylum stories ( Knowles and Trowbridge, 2014). Despite attempts to unearth the patient experience ( Porter, 1987), certain voices, and therefore the experiential stories of being in certain places, remain difficult to hear and continue to challenge the historian’s practice. The multiple lives of those living and working in and creating asylum spaces have been documented, but in many of these studies the patient’s own experience still remains eerily silent or portrayed only through the lens of clinical discourse. This work has deepened the understanding of mental health care in different periods, allowing the experiences of individuals caught up in these ‘care’ systems to seep out of the asylum and into wider histories discussing mental illness, health, creativity, medicalization and well-being. Attention to the differing practices of surveillance in these ‘small spaces’ has also arisen, highlighting the configurations of power bound up with such institutional nooks and crannies ( Hide, 2014 Monk, 2008). Significant work has also opened up the smaller sites and spaces of the asylum, including laboratories ( Finn, 2012), cemeteries ( Philo, 2012), sports facilities ( Ellis, 2013), and specialist sites for treatment such as insulin coma wards ( McGeachan, 2013) and scientific intervention such as post-mortems ( Andrews, 2012 Wallis, 2013). Scull’s (1979, 2006, 2015) calls to expose the range of economic, social, political and cultural dimensions to ‘madness’ has inspired research into the spatial distribution of asylums ( Dear and Wolch, 1987 Philo, 2004), networks of the psychiatric profession ( Andrews and Smith, 1993 Miller, 2004), practicalities of ‘asylumdom’ ( Davis, 2008 MacKenzie, 1992) and individual practitioner and patient case studies ( Beveridge, 2011 McGeachan, 2014). For example, various studies have unpicked the foundations of British and Irish institutions, from the chartered royal hospitals ( Andrews et al., 1997 Prior, 2012 Walsh, 2012) to the more unknown Scottish district asylums ( Ross, 2014), demonstrating their importance in the conceptualization of ‘madness’ and mental health care in different times and places. The vibrancy of recent scholarship on lunatic asylums and their social ramifications within the history of psychiatry is notable, revealing a fascination with the histories of mental ill health and its component ‘spaces’.