Pioneering days earn Gartnavel a place in history

encompasses the care of the mentally ill. Gartnavel belonged to that

unique family, the seven royal Scottish or chartered asylums, and as

such was part of the lunacy reform movement of the nineteenth century.

By 1839, all five Scottish cities and two major towns, Dumfries and

Montrose, had built public charitable asylums which were classic

examples of Scottish philanthropy. Their roots go back to 1769 when the

Montrose project was first mooted and its opening in 1781 was 10 years

prior to Pinel's reforms in Paris.

In the development of the houses, the patronage of the local medical

and legal professions, the mercantile community and civic leadership was

freely given. Each institution was, in most cases, professionally

managed, with financial transactions being carefully accounted.

Through their incorporation by royal charter, they assumed their own

corporate identity, with internal powers and limitations recognised in

law. In short, these chartered asylums created a respectable and

well-governed milieu in which therapy could be prosecuted and which

contrasted so radically with the essentially laissez-faire atmosphere

which prevailed for so long south of the Border.

Gartnavel was the fourth of these institutions to be built. In 1805,

the sugar merchant Bailie Robert McNair, having been appointed a

director of the Town's Hospital, in which most of the city's mentally

ill were at that time incarcerated, decided to work for reform. The

result was the opening of the Glasgow Asylum for Lunatics in 1814 in an

area where what used to be Dobbies Loan and Parliamentary Road

intersected. The building, by William Stark, attracted some critical

acclaim for its innovatory ''panopticon cross'' design, but nevertheless

proved both too small and too close to the city centre to be able to

carry out its therapeutic role, and so plans for a new and much larger

institution were laid in 1839.

After the purchase of 66 acres of land at Gartnavel, Charles Wilson

was appointed architect in January, 1841, and he designed a West House

reserved for about 100 private patients in a handsome Tudor gothic

edifice elevated from a second, plainer East House for about 250 pauper

patients. The new complex was opened on June 12, 1843.

The move to Gartnavel was crucial because by doing so the managers

were able to ensure that the institution remained within the lunacy

reform movement of the time. Expressed simply, this regime, as described

at various times by, for example, the Tukes in York and Pinel in Paris,

required that the patient be treated as humanely as possible in an

environment the positive quality of which conduced to therapy.

By moving to what was then the western edge of the city, the new house

was able to fulfil that most important of reform criteria, that the

asylum be at a distance from a built-up environment.

Occupational therapy, as it is now called, was also able to flower in

the new plot. A full-scale farming operation was established where

produce was used both for the hospital and for sale. Gartnavel was also

equipped with extensive workrooms in which carpentry, joinery,

basket-making and various other trades were practised, most of whose

produce was marketed.

Games, a library, entertainment, visits, all became part of the regime

at Gartnavel. When the members of the royal commission of inquiry into

Scottish lunacy care visited Gartnavel in 1855 they noted that the

sleeping rooms for the fee-paying patients were ''all fully and

comfortably furnished'', the walls ''variously papered'' and the

corridors ''carpeted throughout''.

Most of the corridors contained pianos and time-pieces, most windows

had curtains and the general effect was ''one of elegance and comfort''.

In one such corridor were to be found three gasaliers, two rosewood

tables, a piano, ottomans, small tables for occasional use, Elizabethan

and other chairs. The commission recorded the diet of the fee-paying as

including roasts, stews, fowls, hams, jellies, fruits, coffee and

liqueurs.

This menu was, of course, not available to everyone. As the

architectural design suggests, contracting with local parishes to

receive some of their pauper inmates was initially part of Gartnavel's

role (and had been the case before 1843) and if conditions in the pauper

sector contrasted dramatically with those pertaining in the private

house, it should be recalled that Victorian society was a rigidly

class-demarcated one whose hierarchies were simply replicated at

Gartnavel Royal as at institutions elsewhere.

In short, an elite therapeutic regime for the affluent co-existed

initially at Gartnavel Royal with a more depository ''psychiatry for the

poor''. In the delivery of that service, Gartnavel was, over the years,

to be guided by a number of distinguished physicians, among them Dr

William Hutcheson, Dr Alexander MacIntosh, Dr David Yellowless, who

during his tenure at Gartnavel became the first lecturer in mental

diseases in the University of Glasgow, and Dr Sir David Henderson.

It was Dr Hutcheson who claimed, in common with colleagues at other

pioneering institutions for the mentally ill at the time, that he had

totally abolished personal restraint on inmates in 1840. An analysis of

later case studies suggests that Dr Hutcheson's initiative was not

long-lasting; nevertheless, the overall evidence clearly points to the

pioneering days at Gartnavel Royal as being a time of innovation,

achievement and, above all, humanity in the treatment of mental illness.

* Dr Frank Rice is a lecturer in history at North East Surrey College

of Technology.

* A history of the hospital, Let There Be Light Again, edited by

Jonathan Andrews and Iain Smith, has just been published by Gartnavel

Royal Hospital.