Century-old asylum stories revealed in photographs

Century-old photographs of patients treated in a mental asylum during the Victorian and Edwardian eras are being unearthed to give a rare insight into the lives they led.

Paul Tobia, a former mental health nurse, is devoting his time to studying the patient records of people treated at the hospital known, at the time, as Bristol Lunatic Asylum.

Tobia already leads talks about the patients, and the photographs are being exhibited at the Glenside Hospital Museum, based near Frenchay.

He said: "From about 1890, they started taking photographs of the patients, and these I became particularly interested in because they were really evocative. I felt they really brought the patients to life."

Tobia's research has found that about 46% of the patients got better, and the former hospital is being re-evaluated as a place of hope and recovery.

It is now a campus of the University of the West of England (UWE) and the Glenside Museum is located in the grounds, within the former chapel.

It is one of a few museums in the UK devoted to former mental hospitals.

Tobia is using Bristol Archives to unearth records and said: "When I do a talk, it's always the photographs that people are most interested in."

Tobia said the people who took the photographs thought the images could help diagnose people's conditions.

"But, as diagnostic tools, it doesn't really work," he said. "As expressions of their humanity, I think it does.

"Photography was quite a new thing then and you can see a few of them didn't really want their photographs taken and are turning away.

"I think empathy is the predominant emotion. From my days as a psychiatric nurse, I quite often think, 'Oh they remind me of so and so who I used to nurse," he said.

Stella Man is the consultant director at the museum and said the images gave historians a real insight into what people looked like in Bristol who were poor.

"I think it's a real privilege because normally you only get to see people who were very wealthy in photographs of that time," she added.

Tobia now has 1,000 photographs and a database of all 8,000 patients who were in the asylum up to 1913.

He said he was contacted once or twice a month, by the museum, to members of the public who thought a relative of theirs had been in the asylum.

"If we're lucky there will be a photograph of them, and I often write a little story about their admission and what happened to them.

"People seem quite grateful for that, and I enjoy doing it," he added.

One of the people Tobia found was actor Henry Greene. He had performed at the Theatre Royal in Bristol, now known as Bristol Old Vic.

Greene died of natural causes in the hospital, but many patients got better and went back into the community.

Stella Man says: "We can confidently say now that 46% of our patients did recover.

"It really did try and help people get better, recover and go home."

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