COPYRIGHT TOM LEONARD
9. Psychiatry: Ultimate Pain and Suppression
From Ode to the Gowdspink by Robert Fergusson
Frae fields where Spring her sweets has blawn
We caller verdure owr the lawn,
The gowdspink comes in new attire,
The brawest ‘mang the whistling choir,
That ere the sun can clear his een,
We glib notes sain the simmer’s green
9.1 Bedlam in Edinburgh
Robert Fergusson (1750-1774) was a heaven-taught composer of poetry in the magical ‘Scottish tongue’, and may well have been regarded as greater than Rabbie Burns had he lived longer (Watson 2012). Highly popular on Auld Reekie’s literary scene, he lived the life of Reilly wining and clubbing in the hostelries of Edinburgh’s Old Town. There is an ongoing debate as to whether Ferguson was gay (Pride History Tour, 2022).
But while feeling in a dark mood, Fergusson encountered the controversial Scottish Secessionist preacher John Brown (who wore Christ on his elbow) in Haddington Cemetery in East Lothian in 1772, upon which Fergusson became gripped by the ‘religious melancholia’ and preferred to stay at home. His works took on a gloomy air (he was possibly also suffering from syphilis) and a year later he suffered a brain injury falling down a flight of stairs (Garavelli, 2012).
Robert was subsequently incarcerated in Darien House, Edinburgh’s madhouse, known locally as ‘Bedlam’, on the site of the student-run Bedlam Theatre which has since replaced it on Bristo Place. Having been persuaded by some friends that he was being taken out in a sedan chair to visit another acquaintance, he was conveyed instead to a cell in the asylum, a sepulchrous building abutting the old city wall. On discovering the ruse, a contemporary biographer wrote, Fergusson went into a ‘frantic rage’, wailing hideously, and stirring up shrieks from the other wretched inmates.
Treated like a ‘lunatic’, Robert was locked up and chained to the wall of a damp, cold cell with straw on the floor and only basic sanitation. There, the wretched creature was visited by the erstwhile East India Company surgeon and doctor of medicine, Dr. Andrew Duncan (see Heritage [1]), who was said to become ever more appalled by the mistreatments of the imprisoned inmates and the shocking conditions (Mitchell [1]). But Fergusson was left there to rot.
Robert Fergusson’s life and poetry is immortalised by his fine statue on the Canongate. Following Robert’s frightfully cruel death in Bedlam in October 1774, Andrew Duncan began to contemplate less barbaric ways of incarcerating the mental ill. Thirty-two years later, Parliament granted him £2000 that enabled him to purchase a villa and four acres of land in Morningside. Lucifer still lingers on that accursed ground. The Edinburgh Lunatic Asylum opened in 1813, and the villa was named East House (LHSA[1]). At first, it only took patients who could afford to pay. I wonder how many nutty queer folk could afford to do that. The queer paupers would have needed to stay in places like Bedlam (See also section 8.6 and the attitudes of James Crichton-Browne)
In 1842, ‘West House’ opened its doors to pauper patients. In 1844, it received the inmates of Bedlam. I hope they were given some fresh straw. The neo-Gothic building of Craig House Hospital was opened in 1894, following the purchase of the Craig House estate. In 1972, it was renamed the Thomas Clouston Clinic. The entire complex is nowadays referred to as the Royal Edinburgh Hospital in Morningside, in short the Royal ‘Ed’.
Andrew Duncan may or may not turn in his grave should he hear about conditions at the Royal Ed into the twenty-first century. Based upon my contact on the gay scene with numerous gay outpatients, including ‘Timothy’ and ‘Angus’, and with a number of gay psychiatric nurses, I recommend that we should largely ignore the self-serving propaganda about mental health care, past and present, that is meted out on behalf of NHS Lothian.
There’s seldom been anything particularly progressive about mental health care in the Lothians. James Carnegie, the third Duke of Fife, a second cousin of Queen Elizabeth, was reportedly (Caroline, Duchess of Fife, personal communication) mistreated in Herdmanflat psychiatric hospital in Haddington, shortly before his death in 2015.
I believe that there is systematic violence towards (possibly criminally insane), inpatients in the Professorial Ward, the Orchard Clinic, and the Intensive Care Unit of the Royal Ed. Forced ‘jagging’ of inpatients in the public wards, after they’ve been ‘jumped on’ by two or more orderlies, is still rife, as are ‘supposedly beneficial’ courses of brain damaging ECT. In the year 2000, an NHS doctor of medicine advised me that lobotomies were still occasionally performed there. Inpatients periodically escape, and at least one has died on the nearby railway track. At least one has been maimed jumping off the roof above his ward. A number of long-term criminally insane patients in the Redwood Ward of the Orchard Clinic have suffered from extremely severe physical side effects that have been attended to by in-house doctors of medicine.
I regard conditions in the Royal Ed as remarkably similar to those in the Oregon State Hospital of 1975, as depicted in the film One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, starring Jack Nicolson. The misadventures of the main character Randle McMurphy at the behest of Chief Nurse Mildred Ratched are comparable to the misadventures experienced by many real-life inpatients during the twenty-first century. The Directors of Operations in such mental hospitals should not be permitted to give themselves ‘pats on the back’ while using pretexts to summarily dismiss complaints from helpless inpatients.
Roderick Watson (2012) Robert Fergusson ,1750-1774,(Scottish Poetry Library)
https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poet/robert-fergusson/
Pride History Tour (2022): Pride Month: Meet Robert Fergusson and Sophia Jex-Blake. https://www.realmarykingsclose.com/blog/pride-month-robert-fergusson-sophia-jex-blake/
Dani Garavelli (2012) State of Mind: How the Royal Edinburgh Hospital helped change attitudes to mental illness (The Scotsman)
Sally Mapstone (2003) Drinking and Spewing (London Reviews) https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v25/n18/sally-mapstone/drinking-and-spewing
Heritage [1] Andrew Duncan the Elder (Royal College of Physicians)
https://www.rcpe.ac.uk/heritage/college-history/andrew-duncan-elder
Laura Mitchell [1] The incredible mental health legacy of the man who inspired Robert Burns (Fergusson: Burns Forgotten Hero,BBC)
LHSA [1] Lothian Hospital Histories; Royal Edinburgh Hospital (Lothian Health Services Archive) https://www.lhsa.lib.ed.ac.uk/exhibits/hosp_hist/reh.htm
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