This chapter explores the value and relevance of a combined academic and public engagement approach to the history of medicine. The authors consider a specific mental health project at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind, in the context of a longer tradition of service user involvement in mental health research and museology. It is argued that the project's approach presented a unique opportunity fo…
In this essay, I place in historical context the three themes identified as important for the image of nursing in the Nursing Mirror competition, using nursing textbooks, diaries, memoirs, institutional and committee records and oral histories of nurses who trained in the 1920s and 1930s, largely from the Royal College of Nursing Archive. I begin with “human sympathy,” a trait newly emphasi…
"Chapter 4: This chapter explores the ways historians can analyse museum collections to shed new light on psychiatric history. Focusing on the classic example of the straitjacket to illustrate the way psychiatric objects often function as symbols and practical items, it provides an introduction to material culture for the historian of psychiatry. First, it explores how and where we might find p…