Human beings. Lives. Names. Patients. Conditions. Illnesses. Statistics.

The handwriting is almost impossible to decipher, a stereotype rings true: doctors have terrible handwriting, whether in 2022 or 1922. I handle the documents with the care and attentiveness I would an infant, in sharp contrast to the lecture handouts I had, mere moments before, punched into my laptop bag. It’s not that I don’t value them or won’t read them, but those words can be printed afresh on another white and creaseless sheet, I can pluck them from the ether with a few stabs at a keyboard. These patient records may as well be carved in tablets atop Mount Sinai. The paper I hold every day, from notebooks to novels, feels like it might melt through my hands at any minute, but these patient records are different. Each page has a defined edge, each name and number carry the indentation made by the pen, and the ink somehow does not appear fully dried. They are heavy. Heavy with the weight of history.

Scavenging through the endless list of names and dates, I keep returning to the question at the heart of Sally Swartz’ Rethinking History article: “do words get anywhere near to reflecting experience?”1 I see there are rules for patients and a different set of rules for staff, food is served at the same time every day, while each patient is prescribed varying quantities of words and drugs. We seek to help, to heal; we seek to force assimilation, to make them docile and agreeable. Swartz argues, “constructions of coherent narratives so central to recorded histories obviates against representing madness, which by definition departs from rationality.”2 Lives. Illnesses. Statistics. Voices drowned and trampled while attempting to amplify them. Voices that might have moved mountains and shaped minds. Somewhere between dabbling with his first psychedelics at Harvard and sharing a cage with Charles Manson, Timothy Leary formed his reality tunnel theory founded on a belief that “each person lives in a different reality tunnel from everyone else and is personally responsible for constructing their own existential reality.”3 Like beauty, truth is in the eye of the beholder, and objective reality is a comforting falsehood. Leary took heroic quantities of acid and made some wild claims, but there is something to be said for emerging from your own tunnel, away from the darkness and echoes, and trying to catch a glimpse inside someone else’s. In these archives, there is one reality, one voice, and one way to live.

The weight of history feels heavier still in the basement of the university, far away from the chatter of students, buzz of smartphones and intrusive rays of the low winter sun. Just a stack of documents and me; the silence feels necessary, respectful, almost sacred. A booklet containing all the texts in the hospital library catches my eye, and there is something poetic landing on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.4 Sometimes, we don’t consider illnesses, especially those of the mind, to be something the person has, but rather something that defines them; a big grotesque scarlet ‘A’ for Asylum branded on them forever. Hester Prynne had to remove the weight of the ‘A’ to get a sense of how heavy it was, to grasp her freedom again.5 The weight of history feels comforting in the hands of those looking back but hangs heavier around the necks of those living it. In the patient records, there is a section for each person titled ‘General Appearance and Expression of Face,’ and John is described as having a “dull heavy meaningless” face, as if that weight had altered him physically.6 Can someone have a meaningless face?

Murray Royal Hospital, formerly James Murray’s Royal Lunatic Asylum. The name changed in 1948. They described  behaviour as ‘insane conduct or morbid acts.’7 New words inscribed above a door on a building on a hill. Shifts in the preferred nomenclature used in polite circles, but labels and stigma woven into the blood trip off the tongue long after. I grew up in the shadow of Murray Royal Hospital– just ‘Murrays’ to those who lived there – in a block of council flats separated from the hospital grounds by a five-foot hedge. We wandered around the hospital grounds freely, my friends and I; there was a full-size football pitch we could play on and a beautiful garden right in the middle. Lunatic Asylum.

The hospital became part of the community’s folklore, a shifting but unshakeable component of our very language:

“You know that one about the escaped mental patient with a hook for a hand,” the story told huddled around campfires and repopularised on the edge of my teen years with sacred VHS copies of I Know What You Did Last Summer and Urban Legend being passed from kid to kid.8 9 “That happened right here. In Murray’s. No, I swear on my maw’s life it did.” 

Among ourselves, we’d call the people there ‘nutters’, ‘loons’ and worse, the casual cruelty of youth partially excused by masking fear of things we couldn’t possibly understand. I never told my friends that someone from my own family stayed there, and silently wished not to run into her when we went for a kickabout: I still pang with guilt. I used to strobe.

The police said, “You were the last person to see her,” and I wanted to say, “I’m twelve, mate, I don’t really know what you want me to do with that.” They asked, “Did you notice anything out of the ordinary,” and I wanted to say, “If you ever met her, you’d realise that’s a pretty stupid question.” I said, “No.”

It was my first funeral. The man giving the sermon had a booming, commanding voice, his words swirled around, engulfing the beautiful church she loved so dearly. I wondered why he spoke more about Him than her; she was a wonderful painter, and kind, and funny as shit on her good days.

In the archives there is a photograph of a man, his back to the camera, surrounded by empty chairs.10 Isolated and anonymous. To his left, a television switched off. To his right, a window onto the world, so close yet desperately out of his reach. I wonder if he sees his spectral reflection in the dark glow of the television or in the glass which keeps the world from him. I wonder if she ever sat alone in this room with only hazy reflections for company. I wonder if she closed her eyes and pretended to be somewhere, anywhere, else. I hope the room wasn’t always empty for her, that she sat with friends, and talked and laughed about how silly the rest of us could be outside. That the word ‘asylum’ wasn’t on anyone’s lips and maybe being a part of recorded history wasn’t always so heavy.

Her memorial card was light. Lighter than the patient record buried somewhere in an archive.