Visiting the mentally ill: volunteer visitors at Saskatchewan hospital, Weyburn 1950-1965.

This article offers a glimpse into the lives and activities of some of the patients, volunteers and staff in the Saskatchewan mental health system during the period of deinstitutionalization. Drawing on her own experience as a patient in psychiatric wards as well as ongoing research in the history of mental health, it features the role of Regina Volunteer Visitors in Saskatchewan Hospital, Weyburn and examines the importance of occupational and recreational therapies and activities in improving the lives of the patients in that institution. It emphasizes the perspectives of patients and volunteers who actively worked to develop recreational activities, with the intention of helping individuals connect with the surrounding communities. The views and perspectives presented here are drawn from a variety of historical and oral interview sources, including views from visitors to the asylum and patients who lived within its walls. The author has also been a consumer of mental health services, and spent time in the Provincial Mental Hospital in North Battleford. The article therefore makes an important contribution to enhancing our understanding of the social history of deinstitutionalization, not only for its unique source base, but also because those sources have been examined and explained to readers through the perspectives of a former patient herself. This article draws significant attention to the changing opportunities for patients as they interacted with the women's volunteer groups, as well as to how the changes brought about by the encroaching deinstitutionalization, care in the community, and decisions from "above" affected the individuals on the ground.

Marking the 50th anniversary of the Platt Report: from exclusion, to toleration and parental participation in the care of the hospitalized child.

This paper commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Platt Report in the United Kingdom and traces the history of parental hospital visiting in relation to its recommendation that, 'Parents should be allowed to visit whenever they can, and to help as much as possible with the care of the child' (Ministry of Health, 1959: 38). It tracks how this goal was achieved and identifies how parents moved from being excluded towards being tolerated and finally accepted as participants in their child's care. This is set against a backdrop of changes in society, systems of healthcare and nurse education as well as trends in the care of the hospitalized children from national and international perspectives. It concludes that if we are to meet the needs of hospitalized children in the 21st century, the focus of research must now shift towards seeking their perspectives on care.

Hospital and asylum visiting in historical perspective: themes and issues.

Compared to doctors, patients and institutions, visitors are an understudied constituency in medical history. The collection of essays in this book situates the historical practice of hospital and asylum visiting in broad social, cultural and geographical perspectives. This introduction loosely categorises visitors into four groups: patient visitors, including family and friends; public visitors, such as entertainers, tourists and the clergy, who have no direct formal ties with the institution or the patients; house visitors involved with the management and government of the hospital; and official visitors, who have inspectorial responsibilities. Discussion of the wider historical significance of visiting draws attention to issues such as urban governance, philanthropy, the public sphere, civil society and citizenship.

Receiving the rich, rejecting the poor: towards a history of hospital visiting in nineteenth-century provincial England.

The changing perceptions of visitors to hospitals in provincial England during the long nineteenth century are examined in this chapter. In particular, it discusses the experience of visitors to hospitals in nine general and specialist hospitals in Birmingham, England's 'second city'. Though the history of visitors in this provincial setting supports the general assumption that hospital governors received the rich and rejected the poor, this chapter demonstrates that attitudes to visitors were not always straightforward. Views of hospital governors and medical staff varied with medical specialism, hospital finances, and a host of other factors.

'Family-centred care' in American hospitals in late-Qing China.

Today, patients' families in the West are regaining the access to hospitals that they lost when hospitals emerged as the primary site for medical treatment, research and training at the beginning of the twentieth century. In China, however, families were never excluded from American mission-run hospitals, in fact, they were indispensable. Families were in the waiting rooms, consulting rooms,wards and operating theatres. They provided more than reassurance and comfort: they fed and nursed their sick relatives, acted as advocates and middlemen and may even have lowered the incidence of cross-infection, the scourge of the contemporary hospital in the West.

Care, nurturance and morality: the role of visitors and the Victorian London children's hospital.

Visitors at the Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street, fulfilled an economic, social and marketing role at an institution which, in its earliest years, struggled against significant opposition from medical and charitable critics. Men and women from the respectable classes found a function that reflected well their philanthropic credentials, and that also opened up social and professional opportunities. The parents and families of the patients, however, found themselves marginalised by the hospital, and granted little scope to influence the hospital experience of their children or to interact with the supporters of the institution.

Pariahs or partners? Welcome and unwelcome visitors in the Jenny Lind Hospital for Sick Children, Norwich, 1900-50.

The idea of 'visitors' when applied to hospitals may appear simple and uncontroversial: relatives or friends keeping the sick person company, lifting the spirits and offering support. The reality was more complex and challenging, particularly in the care of child patients. The Jenny Lind Hospital for Sick Children constantly evolved its relationship with visitors in the first half of the twentieth century. Two major variables are discussed in this chapter: the changing importance of the visitors themselves and the way in which the Jenny Lind defined and adapted its perspective on visitors and the nature of visiting.

Infection and citizenship: (not) visiting isolation hospitals in mid-Victorian Britain.

Local authority provision for the sequestration of infectious people mushroomed in Great Britain from the mid-1860s. By the First World War, more than 750 isolation hospitals contained almost 32,000 beds for infectious patients, most of whom were children. Trips to an isolation hospital were problematic because visitors might contract infection there and spread it to the wider community. Various strategies sought to minimise this risk or eliminate it altogether. This chapter argues that the management of isolation hospital visitors was typical of Victorian public health's tendency to regulate people's behaviour. By granting rights to, and conferring responsibilities on, the relatives of patients, visiting practices enshrined notions of citizenship that sought to govern 'through' the family.

Stage-managing a hospital in the eighteenth century: visitation at the London Lock Hospital.

London's Lock Hospital, established in 1747 to treat venereal diseases, depended heavily on charity. Its administrators tried valiantly to project a positive image of the hospital in spite of the pervading moral assumptions about its patients and doubts about whether they deserved charity. Policies governing visitation were bound up in the hospital's attempts to police itself and promote its cause to benefactors. Visitation policies served numerous ends, including policing patients, introducing moral reform, monitoring the staff, and obscuring the reality of the wards from public view, ensuring that prospective donors only saw what administrators wanted them to see.

'The keeper must himself be kept': visitation and the lunatic asylum in England, 1750-1850.

There was a growing disquiet in eighteenth-century England about the activities of private madhouses. Early legislation, in 1774, gave limited powers of registration and inspection to local magistrates.The exposure of flagrant abuses in both private and public institutions by a parliamentary select committee, in 1815, brought the question of visitation to the centre of the lunacy reform agenda. Subsequent legislation extended the responsibilities of magistrates and also established the principal of centralised oversight. An effective national system of regulation was finally created in 1845, with Commissioners in Lunacy required to provide formal visitation to all public and private asylums.

'In view of the knowledge to be acquired': public visits to New York's asylums in the nineteenth century.

This chapter examines asylum tourism in nineteenth-century New York. It argues that the popularity of visits by the public undermines the notion that asylums were segregated from greater society, and instead, suggests that these institutions were deeply embedded within the social and cultural landscape of the time. While challenging many of our assumptions regarding the relationship of asylums with their greater communities, the phenomenon of visiting enhances our understanding of both popular attitudes towards the mentally ill and the experiences of patients themselves. As people believed asylums represented something remarkable in society, visiting provides new perspectives on the social role of these institutions and nineteenth-century cultural practices more generally.

'Amusements are provided': asylum entertainment and recreation in Australia and New Zealand c.1860-c.1945.

This chapter examines the official 'entertainment', in all its forms, provided to inmates in Australian and New Zealand asylums--later mental hospitals--between c.1860 and c.1945. Visitors came into asylum grounds and patients were permitted periods of leave, all for the purposes of entertainment and recreation. Surviving recreation buildings, their grounds and institutional archives, bear silent witness to the noisy and lively recreational activities of past patients, staff and visitors. This chapter reconstructs these practices in twenty public and three private asylums from this period by examining a diverse range of sources, including archives, histories of asylums and newspaper articles.

Challenging institutional hegemony: family visitors to hospitals for the insane in Australia and New Zealand, 1880s-1910s.

Historians have increasingly come to identify that there was considerable traffic between nineteenth-century psychiatric institutions and the world beyond, with official visitors recording details of their regular forays inside asylum walls, and sometimes family members visiting the institution to check on treatments, patients' progress and welfare. This chapter explores the broad array of experiences of asylum visitors in colonial Australia and New Zealand, focusing on families and their responses to the institution. It draws upon a range of materials to show that visitors found their way inside the hospital for the insane, both in their letters and through their actual physical presence. Through these glimpses, it suggests that the asylum itself should be unsettled as the focus of all the meanings of insanity and its cure.

Families, insanity, and the psychiatric institution in Australia and New Zealand, 1860-1914.

International historians have begun to challenge the view that the nineteenth-century psychiatric hospital was a place of horrors and custody, and have shown that families were sometimes intimate with the institutions of the past, often participating in the process of institutional committal. This article explores the state of historical inquiry into families and insanity in Australia and New Zealand. It asserts that by re-examining patient cases we might find fresh insights into the dynamic between families and mental health. Through a close examination of archival sources, the article argues, we can see the presence of families 'inside' the asylum in several ways. Overall, the article suggests that institutional archives present both opportunity and risk for historians intent on discovering 'what happened' to the insane and their families.

Changing attitudes towards the care of children in hospital: a new assessment of the influence of the work of Bowlby and Robertson in the UK, 1940-1970.

It is generally believed that the work of Bowlby and Robertson was new and decisive in changing the hospital conditions for young children. The fact that parents in the UK and other European countries can now visit their sick child at any time they wish or even room-in is attributed to an acquaintance with Bowlby's findings and Robertson's well-known films about the potentially detrimental effects of hospital stays for young children. In this paper we shall argue that this picture is incomplete and that, historically, things were rather more intricate. Bowlby and Robertson were neither the first nor the only researchers who tried to change hospital policies. Moreover, the older hospital policies were not uniformly bad. Long before Bowlby and Robertson began their plea for reforms, several individuals and hospitals had already introduced conditions that we now still regard as exemplary. The whole change towards more liberal, flexible, and humane practices in children's wards took place over several decades and was fuelled by both worried medical doctors, pressure groups of parents, sympathetic editors of medical journals, and emerging new research findings such as those provided by Bowlby and Robertson. In that societal debate, the voices of Bowlby and Robertson were influential but not necessarily new or decisive.

The changing role of parents in neonatal care: a historical review.

Over the past century, improvements in technology and neonatal care techniques have dramatically reduced infant mortality rates. While this progress continues, a growing body of literature supports the significant role that parents play in the development of infants, particularly within the hospital setting. Throughout much of the twentieth century, various barriers prevented many parents from participating in thc care of their neonates, negatively influencing infant outcomes. Today parental involvement in neonatal carc has become a key part of a larger family-centered care model. This historical review describes how past neonatal care practices affected the roles of parents, from absence or indirect involvemcnt to the important involved roles of today. Understanding current trends in relation to these past experiences may encourage the formulation of family-centered care practices now and in the friture.

Separation and psychological trauma: a paradox examined.

This paper explores the separation of children from their parents that took place in British hospitals in the middle years of the 20th century (Bradley 2001). It is widely believed that this child-parent separation was the product of a failure to understand the child's psychological and social needs (Bowlby et al 1939, Brain and Maclay 1968, Branstetter 1966, Editorial 1957). Paediatric nurses have been blamed for this ignorance and the resulting failure of care (Bowlby et al 1939). However, evidence suggests that such accusations are flawed in logic and in fact: paediatric nurses of the time were fully conversant with the prevailing understanding of child psychology and practised that psychology. In this article it is argued that the cause of child-parent separation lies elsewhere. Data are drawn from a study concerning the social history of paediatric nursing between 1920 and 1970 (Jolley 2004). Oral history data were collected from past nurses of children and from people who had been in hospital as children within this period. Oral history data from 30 participants were recorded, content analysed and validated by the participants.