Madness, Suicide and the Victorian Asylum: Attempted Self-Murder in the Age of Non-Restraint

Extract

On 20 July 1870, Catherine Tyrrell found herself transferred to another asylum. The 32-year-old nurse suffering from melancholia had previously been a private patient in Bethlem Hospital; but, having had her twelve months expire at that institution, she was conveyed across the metropolis and into the bucolic countryside and county asylum of Buckinghamshire. Up to this point, Catherine had had a long and sad history of suicide attempts and food refusal. Indeed, when she was transferred the following year, this time from Buckinghamshire to the Surrey County Asylum at Wandsworth, she was listed as “very suicidally disposed”. Now diagnosed as suffering from “mania”, she managed only three months before arriving at her fourth institution in as many years—the Surrey County Asylum at Brookwood. On admission, the medical superintendent described, with transparent disapproval, the precautionary clothing that held her suicidal impulses in check:

She was brought in a canvas garment which fitted her person even down to her ankles, the arms however not going through the sleeves, but being folded across her chest close to her skin, the hands being locked in leather gloves. The jacket or whatever it is called being [fastened] at the back by 5 locks. All this complicated arrangement was immediately removed. There was no clothing of ordinary kind under it.