Fair Mile Hospital by Ian Wheeler

Author:Ian Wheeler
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780750964791
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2015-04-29T04:00:00+00:00

Some Anecdotes from the Author’s Collection

After some consideration, a few tales from the asylum are offered as impartial illustrations of the real-life struggle between different realities. Consider, if you will, that even what we call normal life often contains events more bizarre than any of these.

During Dr Gilland’s tenure, a severely withdrawn and depressed man was, at length, placed in front of a harmonium, which he gradually began to play. As time went on, his evident musical talent was rediscovered, until he was arranging and transcribing music for use by the asylum. On his discharge, Dr Gilland regretted the loss of his very useful abilities.

A male patient persistently hallucinated, seeing pigs’ heads appearing out of the ground in front of him as he took his exercise in the courtyard. He kicked at these apparitions and rapidly scuffed out the toes of his boots. Being only human, besides sick and tired of replacing his footwear at frequent intervals, someone judiciously hammered a small nail into the toe of the patient’s boot. The next time the patient took a flying kick at the imaginary pigs’ heads, he received an early form of aversion therapy. Although this kind of thing was clearly not acceptable, it was apparently quite successful.

A troublesome and destructive female patient in the 1920s had to be confined to a side room and, when needing to use the toilet, would be issued with a rubber chamber pot. On a memorable occasion, someone made a mistake and a china pot was provided. On entering the side room ‘post performance’, Nurse Lilian Brignall was the unlucky recipient of the flying pot and, worse, its contents. In the 1920s, although nursing staff were issued with winter and summer uniforms, they received only one of each and they did not lend themselves to easy laundering. In consequence, after recovering some of her dignity, Lilian had to wear patients’ clothing for the rest of the day.

An unfortunate lady developed a taste for arachnids. She would pop them in her mouth whenever she caught one and later announce to whoever would listen, ‘I had a beautiful spider today, dear.’

During the mid-1920s, another female patient was in the habit of using a chamber pot, rather than the WCs. Unless the nurses were vigilant, she was liable to stick her head into the pot after making water. Lilian Brignall observed, however, that ‘she had the most beautiful head of golden hair’!

A patient called John had charge of the horse-drawn mower that was used to tend the lawns and cricket field. He suffered from religious mania, a recognised psychiatric condition, and one day in the 1930s, to show his devotion he embellished the Oval – that sacrosanct turf inside the carriage circle – with an enormous cross of breadcrumbs. Although his masterpiece was short-lived, one imagines that the local bird population, and perhaps St Francis, were suitably appreciative.

John’s other claim to fame was that he was a serial absconder and had, uniquely, taken a graceful flying leap over the

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