School for the Blind architecture – and a secret tunnel
Images of the School for the Blind in Liverpool through time, from the archives of National Museums Liverpool.
Who was Miss Violet Eleanor Mills?
Nina explores a young woman admitted to an asylum with insomnia and visions with religious overtones. She asks how we should interpret the diagnoses of other periods.
Beyond Maison Dieu: more medieval hospitals in the Canterbury area
Other medieval hospitals near the pilgrimage site of Canterbury help us build a picture of care during the period.
A ‘falconer with leprosy’: some residents at medieval hospitals
Religious houses offered sanctuary to disabled people and those with illnesses. Ann Newman puts some names and occupations to those who stayed there.
Stimulating the Senses: How Normansfield Hospital used performance
Anna Ellis finds memories of an enlightened approach at Normansfield Hospital, very different to many Victorian asylums.
Going to hospital, medieval style
Centuries before the NHS, monasteries were a refuge for the sick. Ann Newman is researching the records of one such place, St John’s Canterbury.
Operation Etsy: valuing craftwork over time
Basket-weaving: the beautiful product of skilled labour valued by the well off, or low status work for disabled people, replacing an education? Esther Fox discusses how, at different times, it has been both.
Institutional propaganda and ‘educative convalescence’
How ‘sleepy sickness’ – the illness described by Oliver Sacks came to Bristol, and how disabled children helped soldiers returning from WW1 adapt to the loss of limbs.
Deciphering the handwriting of the past at Chiswick House
Nina on the difficulty of deciphering other people’s handwriting in historical documents, and the quest to find women’s lives at Chiswick Asylum.
Becoming a History Detective
Maxine Clarke on the thrill of holding 14th century vellum – and realising that Chaucer’s Wife of Bath is deaf.