Andrew Scull
THE D R. GUISLAIN MUSEUM: AN APPRECIATION Foreword
The asylum once seemed to be one of the most enduring symbols of civilisation’s determination to isolate and hide away the men tally ill. Though it proclaimed itself a therapeutic institution, its public image was more as the Bluebeard’s cupboard of the neigh bourhood, a Gothic castle behind whose high walls and barred windows, a nameless horror lurked. Its inmates were shut up in every sense of the term, lost from public view, their utterances dis missed as the ravings of Unreason, their lives at the mercy of those who presumed to act in their name. Stigma, shame and scandal have persistently shadowed madness, and our struggles to under stand alienation, to deal compassionately with those who suffer from it, and to conjure up effective responses to its ravages and depredations, continue unabated in the present. We now live in the twilight of the asylum age. The once-familiar ‘museums’ of madness that haunted the imagination of our forebears are fast-fading from our collective consciousness. A few have been repurposed, albeit with strenuous efforts to mask their past history — as housing for the nouveaux riches, for example, London’s Colney Hatch Asylum transformed into the Princess Park Manor development; or as va cation spots for the moneyed classes, doubtless blissfully unaware that they are occupying what was once Venice’s madhouse for women now repurposed as a luxury hotel on San Clemente Island, whose owners boast with no sense of irony that it is ‘the perfect destination to unwind in total relaxation’. Most mental hospitals, however, have fallen into disrepair, a sad collection of neglected hulks slowly suffering the fate that awaits us all: ‘dust thou art, and unto dust thou shall return’, as the Book of Genesis would have it. It is thus singularly appropriate that what I regard as the world’s leading psychiatry museum, the Dr. Guislain Museum, should be housed in the walls of a nineteenth-century asylum. Museums of psychiatry, rather like medical museums, are a rare species these days. Medical museums were once very common.
A N A P P R E C I AT I O N — 7
