Work, Mental Health & the Asylum🧠
In this post, it's all about the small stories that shed light on the relationship between industrialisation, work and mental health.
Hello to you lovely and historical humans 👋
This week is Mental Health Awareness Week, and I hope that it finds you well. (And if it doesn’t, please reach out).
We ended our last little foray into industrialisation in the world of work and today, I’d like to start thinking about the relationship between that world and mental health.
A Bit of Personal History 🙋🏻♀️
In 2015, I signed a book deal to write a history of this very subject - with a bit of physical and moral health thrown in for good measure.
But why am I not talking about this book, I hear you ask?!
Well, to cut a long story short: I’m not really down with being exploited by a pale, male and stale publisher so I dissolved the contract. I did continue to do a lot of work on the book - some of which I’ve shared here with you over the last month or so. It’s one of those projects that I feel really drawn to, as though I was always meant to do it. But here we are, SEVEN YEARS LATER, and I’m ashamed to say it’s only about 75% complete. In fairness, the research takes AGES.
Like, DAYS AND DAYS AND DAYS.
I could make life easy for myself but where’s the fun when you’re not challenged? I don’t like doing things other people have done. That’s their thing. I like doing my own thing, which is synonymous with ‘lots of research that takes ages.’
Anyway, the whole idea for this book-that-never-got-published came from learning some really cool etymology. So if you’re not familiar: the phrase “mad as a hatter” wasn’t invented by Lewis Carroll when he wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The phrase predates his book considerably. What Carroll and his contemporaries didn’t yet know was that hatters were indeed driven ‘mad’ but not by their intemperate habits (as it was argued time and time again) but by exposure to mercury.
Mad Hatter Disease 🎩
Hatters became exposed to mercury while carrying out a process called ‘carrotting’ in which they used a chemical compound to separate the fur from the body of a small animal, usually a rabbit. The process was called ‘carrotting’ because mercury nitrate, the compound used by the hatter, is orange in colour. 🥕 The fur was then used to make hats.
Continuous exposure to mercury caused a condition that we call Erethism, or Mad Hatter Disease. Some common symptoms include:
Twitches and tremors
Changes in behaviour
Irritablility
Excitability
Skin rashes
Vomiting
To the contemporary observer, these symptoms were evidence of ‘madness.’ Thus, the phrase ‘mad as a hatter’ was born.
Integrating Work and Mental Health 🧠
There are two key points for us to understand here:
Because mercury had not been identified as the real culprit behind mad hatter disease, workplace legislation was not introduced to make hat-making a safer occupation. So while we teach students that conditions started to improve for workers during industrialisation, we have to be mindful of the fact that this was not widespread across all industries. It really isn’t cut and dry, and to suggest otherwise to students deprives them of so much depth.
Because society deemed hatters to be ‘mad,’ they were treated for mercury poisoning in mental health facilities, or asylums, instead of hospitals. The fact that society no longer treats mercury poisoning in this way speaks volumes about contemporary attitudes to mental health.
Real Stories from the South Yorkshire Asylum 🏥
It’s not enough for me to read about the effects of mercury poisoning on hatters, I want to know the ins and the outs.
To do that, I went to my happy place: THE ARCHIVES ♥♥♥♥♥♥
I found myself in the Middlewood Hospital in Sheffield, also known as the South Yorkshire Asylum. Opened in 1872, its sole purpose was to deal with the problem of overcrowding at the nearby West Riding County Asylum in Wakefield.
As an aside - from 1845, all counties in Britain were legally required to build and fund asylums for people suffering from mental health conditions. As horrible as it is, these people were called ‘pauper lunatics,’ meaning that they couldn’t afford to pay for their care, so local governments footed the bill. If you had the finances, you were expected to pay for your own care, and you were simply called a ‘patient.’ These wealthier patients were not generally treated in county asylums but in private establishments that were often referred to as ‘madhouses.’
Anyway, I’ve digressed massively, haven’t I?
So …
It didn’t take me long to find a couple of ‘pauper lunatics’ who worked as hatters. The records didn’t give me a huge amount of info but enough to realise that they all shared the same story. Johnathan Hey, for example, was a hatter from Huddersfield who arrived at Middlewood on 16th June 18881. On his diagnostic paperwork, doctors claimed that he had “gone mad” after convincing himself that he been “deprived of a great fortune.” He was considered ‘cured’ and sent home on 20th August.
The thing with the archives, though, is that you go in looking for one thing and end up finding something else. And even though I know it’s coming, I get suckered in every. single. time.
File Cutters
See what I mean?! 😂
Anyway, have you heard of a file cutter before? Because I hadn’t. It never occurred to me that before mechanisation, somebody had to beat the s**t out of a piece of steel to A) form the shape of a file tool and then B) form its individual grooves and teeth.
File cutting was a big industry in 19th-century Sheffield, employing at least 2000 men at any one time. When a file cutter started banging away on his file, he laid it on a ‘bed’ to keep it steady and to minimise recoil. But that caused serious problems for cutters because that bed was made of lead.
Lead poisoning causes a range of health problems, from joint pain and vomiting to memory loss and poor concentration. Contemporaries knew just how dangerous it was for file cutters to work with lead. What really surprised me was that when a file cutter began to exhibit symptoms, he was treated in an asylum, not a hospital.
Thomas Aizlewood was a Sheffield file cutter who was admitted to the Middlewood Hospital with “lead colic” on 28th September 1885. After a brief stay, he went home but returned on 7th August. He was admitted for a third time on 3rd March 1886 but never made it home. He died on 19th July 1890.
I believe that between his visits, Thomas may have gone back to cutting files, causing further exposure to lead. His employment options would have been pretty limited in the steel town of Sheffield and (having traced his family because I just can’t help myself) I know that he came from a BIG family of file cutters, many of whom carried out their work at home and not in a factory. This placed the entire family in danger of being poisoned. So even if Thomas stopped working, the chances are that other members of the household did not.
I wanted to share these stories with you because it’s important for us to think about how far we’ve come in terms of mental health, economic inequities and working conditions. More importantly, where do we go from here?
I also wanted to share these stories with you because the shame of openly admitting that I haven’t finished the book *might* just make me do some research …
Until next time,
Kaye x
P.S. For an extra history fix:
🖤 I wrote a short history of girls hating physics.
🖤 And shared some horribly outdated terms from my mental health research in the 19th century.
🖤 And BIG CHANGES to British schools (and how they teach history) are coming.
🖤 Don’t miss these wonderful images of women from the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum.