Entering Other Worlds
Cheryl McGeachan
William sees his constable, Muir, at the entrance to the close, awkwardly holding back a knot of bystanders trying to peer inside.
‘I think she is dead, sir.’ The young man is pale. William has been a police surgeon of the Glasgow district for over three years now and has already seen his fair share of dead bodies. Muir clearly has not.
‘Let’s get inside then, and see what we are dealing with.’ Pushing past the onlookers, William enters the ground floor tenement, followed somewhat reluctantly by his constable.
There’s muttering. A woman shouts ‘They’re mad, the pair o them. Dirty slitters!’
Inside the flat, the December chill grips every room, clinging to the walls and furniture like an icy fog. Instinct leads William to the front room and he takes in the scene quickly, pausing at the body slumped in armchair by the dwindling fire. He notes numerous teacups brimming with congealing brown liquid balanced on every surface. The air is thick with flies, the noise a heavy drone. He calls to Muir who is hovering in the lobby to bring in his notebook. They both draw closer to the body.
The bright red of her satin blouse is the first thing that catches Bill’s eye, the neckline flopping open. The contours of the woman’s throat – thin, ill nourished – lead him upwards to hollow unblinking eyes. It’s been years but always, the stillness unnerves him, the feeling bordering on panic, the contemplation of the dead.
William clears his throat to brush away the thoughts. ‘I’d say she’s been dead for approximately a week,’ William declares. ‘There are no immediate signs of trauma.’
Muir opens his notebook as William proceeds methodically around the body, examining the skull for injury, lifting the cold eyelids. His pencil moves laboriously to take down the police surgeon’s comments. A fly lands on the page as he writes, and Muir flails at it. William ignores the hunters awaiting their prey, only watching what is before him, his mind mapping the body, thinking of the mortuary examination to come.
He knows at times like this his medical training takes control, ignoring the intimacies of the body and thinking of hidden wounds and contusions. Yet a part of him remains untamed by the laws and attributes of medicine. Inevitably William finds himself searching for the person’s humanity, attempting to connect with her life and suffering. He considers her final moments, her final stare.
An oval silver locket, by far the most valuable item in the room, hangs low beneath her chest. William opens it to reveal photographs, an older man and woman. Memories encased and unknown now, lives that must have been entwined with hers.
‘Age around 50 years,’ William resumes his narrative to Muir, who is stamping his feet in an attempt to keep warm. As the daylight fades, the fire has burnt to embers leaving the room in shadow. William pulls himself to his feet. ‘It is time to move the body, Muir. Fetch the stretcher.’
As the constable goes to the door, there’s a commotion and a ragged figure tries to push past him into the room. ‘You can’t take her!’ A female voice, loud and shrill, and a flurry of ragged clothing. ‘Please! She has to stay with me!’ Muir contains the woman quite easily and William becomes aware of a smell of soiled clothing. ‘The pair o them,’ someone had said. So there is a family member, and the case takes a new turn.
‘Who do we have here?’ William keeps his voice level.
‘My name is Jane Stirling, sir, and I live here with my sister.’
William nods kindly, seeing the woman’s agitation, and leads her to the other armchair. He lights a candle, aware that his hands are shaking slightly, and pulls a chair up to sit opposite her.
‘So you know this lady, Jane?’
The woman’s pinched features dance in the candlelight and she speaks in a slow whisper. ‘Of course, sir, she is my sister.’
William’s mind quickly ranges over the progress of the case – a neighbour’s notification of a noxious smell, the sisters unseen for days, the attendance of the constable Muir, who upon discovering the body had then summoned William from the police station on Bell Street. The number of flies in the room, the choking smell, the brimming teacups – placed in front of the body in hope? – all testify to his estimated time of death. The cause still unknown, and yet he doubts this shaking figure in front of him is responsible.
Her despair is so apparent, William folds his hands lest he try to reach out in comfort. He knows about all-encompassing grief. He nods gently as Jane explains about her sister’s unexpected death. A short illness – fever, delirium, then silence – leading to her passing.
‘I had just gone to make tea, and when I came back she was gone.’ Her frail body trembles as she recounts these final moments. ‘I wasn’t able to wake her.’
‘Jane,’ William’s voice drops almost to a whisper. ‘You do know that your sister is dead?’
Jane’s eyelids flicker several times in the silence. ‘I do, sir.’ She tilts her head and looks at William, who nods slowly in agreement.
‘Then you know that we have to take the body and bury her, she can’t stay here any longer.’ William prepares to stand.
‘No sir, you cannot take her. I will not allow it.’ There’s something in the woman’s tone that makes him stop. Her eyes are as cold as the air in the room. ‘My mother and father have recently come back to us, and it is terrible that I buried them, they could have stayed here but now they have spent all this time making their way back. I should have let them stay here.’ Jane’s voice gets louder, more shrill, her hands tightly clasped together.
William’s aware of Muir moving closer to the woman in case she might go for him. He frowns, perplexed, attempting to clarify Jane’s words. He thinks of the unsmiling couple, photographs contained within the silver locket. ‘Your parents are dead? But they have now returned? You’ll need to help me understand.’
Jane Stirling’s voice rises in a whine that becomes a diatribe bordering on raving. ‘How dare you come into our home invade our private world you cannot take her she will return in five years just like mother and father you fools! I know you think I am mad – ’ She gulps for breath, taking her burning eyes from William and casting them on Muir, who is visibly shocked, ‘I suppose I cannot blame you I felt mad when I heard their voices they came back yes they did I tried to sleep but there was no sleep but they are here and I am no longer alone! The dead can return to us! They – are – here!’ Her breath is hot, and William feels the air in the room move.
Back in his office at Bell Street, William sighs and reaches for his fountain pen to finish his notes. It’s after 2am and his bones are weary for rest, but his mind needs to process the day before shutting off. He thinks of Jane and the look of fear and disdain she gave him as she left the police station for onward travel to the Asylum. He knows little of the inner workings of Gartnavel Royal, but its reputation lingers in his imagination – a place of horror and supposed rest and possible cure. How will this disturbed woman fare? What else could he do? These thoughts sit heavily with him as he tries to write up his observations. The intensity of the woman’s delusion is still with him.
He must acquaint himself with the place and makes a note to arrange a visit. In his work, there are as many souls in need of this manner of repair as well as physical help. His mind drifts to his mother and the depth of grief he felt after her death. He would still give anything to have her return to him, to speak to her again; it is not so very mad to imagine it, after all. Closing his notebook, he pictures Jane, by now hopefully admitted to the Asylum, sleeping amongst strangers, no longer alone. He hopes they treat her well. He’s unsure if she will ever make it home.
Returning to the World: A Reflection on Process
I am always intrigued where the stories begin in case notes. Compelled by the moments when people turn into patients. Where lives and experiences are transformed into scenes and symptoms of illness.
My process of working with these materials begins by connecting to the details they portray:
We begin with a date – December 22nd 1877. I am transported to thoughts of Christmas and a cold Glasgow winter.
We are given a name and an age – Jane Stirling or Crawford, age 52 years. I feel instantly connected. A human shadow of a woman appears in mind.
We are given a beginning – ‘Was brought to the asylum today’. Such a small statement with such monumental impacts.
The journey to asylum is an often skipped over moment in the history of asylums and psychiatry. Yet I often think about that experience. That day Jane was taken from her home to the police station and then transported to Gartnavel asylum. She encountered numerous people and experienced varying emotions during this journey yet nothing of this is charted in these records. It is another forgotten moment in the lives of mental health care, a slippery set of encounters that appear too insignificant to note. Yet, this day was life changing for Jane. The spaces she walked out of and into altered every aspect of her existence. These lived geographies matter.
‘On admission she was quiet and knew she was in an asylum but was indignant at being sent to such a place’
What did it feel like for Jane to be led through the doors of Gartnavel asylum and into the inner spaces of the hospital? Did her heartbeat loudly as she walked up the front steps? Was she afraid or did she feel numb from the unusual nature of her experience? Who else did she see that day as she was led down the long corridors, as she stepped slowly into 3 and a half years of incarceration?
‘Go away, go away’
We know little about Jane as a person but are given fleeting details about her existence as a patient. The only words we hear of Jane’s are used to show her lack of cooperation with the system and those that surround her in this strange new world. She is labelled increasingly irritable, evasive, and scolding as the months and years of asylum life ticks by. She occupies her time through knitting and walking around the grounds.
‘Relieved’
The end of the story is always just another beginning.
A phrase that intrigues me from the case notes is that of ‘returning to the world’; what Jane believed her parents had done after their death and that her sister would do. I think about the process of working with patient case notes and it strikes me that this is what they help us to do: they help us to return these individuals back to life. Yet, how do you return these patients and their lived experiences back to the contemporary world? What possibilities and pitfalls does doing so achieve?
This project is about ‘writing the asylum,’ yet it remains somewhat an impermeable place. The large case note files, scribbled with recollections from history, entomb experiences of others for us to see. Yet the secrets they hold are far greater than the tales they tell. However, it is within the margins and the silences of these records that critical spaces of understanding emerge. Gaps that force us into questioning the unknowable.
So, how to write about Jane? What are the fleshy realities of her life revealed in the snapshot of existence presented in these case notes? What are the differences between that which is described and what is really lived in these asylum worlds? The creative component of this project allows us to create new worlds, giving creative licence to push the boundaries of what can be known. I want to take this opportunity to explore Jane’s worlds beyond and through the asylum. The space of the police office, briefly mentioned in the case notes, captures my imagination and connects me to my interest in nineteenth century police surgeons. A figure who enters the worlds of others at their darkest moments. I want to take us back to the scene of death to explore the spaces of Jane’s grief. Something that strikes me as so raw yet unmentioned in the documents. Imagining Jane’s home and events that happened there offer a way to think about her journey to asylum in its broadest sense. Case notes begin when a person becomes a patient, but it is what has happened to them as a person that has brought them to the asylum’s door. Giving space to Jane’s world through a creative reimagining of her journey has given me the opportunity to go beyond the walls of the asylum, to enter new worlds and ways of knowing the person, and to develop a stronger sense of humanity for writing the histories of mental ill-health.
[Patient record for Jane Stirling, HB13/5/98]
Cheryl McGeachan is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Glasgow. Her work specialises in exploring the lived worlds of mental ill-health from a variety of historical and contemporary perspectives. As a passionate collaborator she works in partnership with people and collections in order to attempt to understand the lived geographies of mental ill-health and their worldly configurations. Cheryl has worked with mental health charities, museum curators, artists, individuals with lived experience of mental ill-health, storytellers, prison educators, mental health nurses, archivists and creative writers to unearth the histories and geographies of asylum and post-asylum spaces, paying acute attention to the experiential nature of being-in and living through such times and places. She has published widely on the subject of mental ill-health, including reflections on Art Extraordinary and outsider art, R.D. Laing, and Scottish asylum spaces. Recent collaborative work with the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow has extended existing shared work on mental ill-health to consider aspects of crime and violence through the figure of the Scottish police surgeon. Through this collaboration both have been moved and challenged by the troubling nature of (re)telling stories of crime and violence and have looked to creative modes of telling for inspiration and insight.
Entering Other Worlds
Cheryl McGeachan
William sees his constable, Muir, at the entrance to the close, awkwardly holding back a knot of bystanders trying to peer inside.
‘I think she is dead, sir.’ The young man is pale. William has been a police surgeon of the Glasgow district for over three years now and has already seen his fair share of dead bodies. Muir clearly has not.
‘Let’s get inside then, and see what we are dealing with.’ Pushing past the onlookers, William enters the ground floor tenement, followed somewhat reluctantly by his constable.
There’s muttering. A woman shouts ‘They’re mad, the pair o them. Dirty slitters!’
Inside the flat, the December chill grips every room, clinging to the walls and furniture like an icy fog. Instinct leads William to the front room and he takes in the scene quickly, pausing at the body slumped in armchair by the dwindling fire. He notes numerous teacups brimming with congealing brown liquid balanced on every surface. The air is thick with flies, the noise a heavy drone. He calls to Muir who is hovering in the lobby to bring in his notebook. They both draw closer to the body.
The bright red of her satin blouse is the first thing that catches Bill’s eye, the neckline flopping open. The contours of the woman’s throat – thin, ill nourished – lead him upwards to hollow unblinking eyes. It’s been years but always, the stillness unnerves him, the feeling bordering on panic, the contemplation of the dead.
William clears his throat to brush away the thoughts. ‘I’d say she’s been dead for approximately a week,’ William declares. ‘There are no immediate signs of trauma.’
Muir opens his notebook as William proceeds methodically around the body, examining the skull for injury, lifting the cold eyelids. His pencil moves laboriously to take down the police surgeon’s comments. A fly lands on the page as he writes, and Muir flails at it. William ignores the hunters awaiting their prey, only watching what is before him, his mind mapping the body, thinking of the mortuary examination to come.
He knows at times like this his medical training takes control, ignoring the intimacies of the body and thinking of hidden wounds and contusions. Yet a part of him remains untamed by the laws and attributes of medicine. Inevitably William finds himself searching for the person’s humanity, attempting to connect with her life and suffering. He considers her final moments, her final stare.
An oval silver locket, by far the most valuable item in the room, hangs low beneath her chest. William opens it to reveal photographs, an older man and woman. Memories encased and unknown now, lives that must have been entwined with hers.
‘Age around 50 years,’ William resumes his narrative to Muir, who is stamping his feet in an attempt to keep warm. As the daylight fades, the fire has burnt to embers leaving the room in shadow. William pulls himself to his feet. ‘It is time to move the body, Muir. Fetch the stretcher.’
As the constable goes to the door, there’s a commotion and a ragged figure tries to push past him into the room. ‘You can’t take her!’ A female voice, loud and shrill, and a flurry of ragged clothing. ‘Please! She has to stay with me!’ Muir contains the woman quite easily and William becomes aware of a smell of soiled clothing. ‘The pair o them,’ someone had said. So there is a family member, and the case takes a new turn.
‘Who do we have here?’ William keeps his voice level.
‘My name is Jane Stirling, sir, and I live here with my sister.’
William nods kindly, seeing the woman’s agitation, and leads her to the other armchair. He lights a candle, aware that his hands are shaking slightly, and pulls a chair up to sit opposite her.
‘So you know this lady, Jane?’
The woman’s pinched features dance in the candlelight and she speaks in a slow whisper. ‘Of course, sir, she is my sister.’
William’s mind quickly ranges over the progress of the case – a neighbour’s notification of a noxious smell, the sisters unseen for days, the attendance of the constable Muir, who upon discovering the body had then summoned William from the police station on Bell Street. The number of flies in the room, the choking smell, the brimming teacups – placed in front of the body in hope? – all testify to his estimated time of death. The cause still unknown, and yet he doubts this shaking figure in front of him is responsible.
Her despair is so apparent, William folds his hands lest he try to reach out in comfort. He knows about all-encompassing grief. He nods gently as Jane explains about her sister’s unexpected death. A short illness – fever, delirium, then silence – leading to her passing.
‘I had just gone to make tea, and when I came back she was gone.’ Her frail body trembles as she recounts these final moments. ‘I wasn’t able to wake her.’
‘Jane,’ William’s voice drops almost to a whisper. ‘You do know that your sister is dead?’
Jane’s eyelids flicker several times in the silence. ‘I do, sir.’ She tilts her head and looks at William, who nods slowly in agreement.
‘Then you know that we have to take the body and bury her, she can’t stay here any longer.’ William prepares to stand.
‘No sir, you cannot take her. I will not allow it.’ There’s something in the woman’s tone that makes him stop. Her eyes are as cold as the air in the room. ‘My mother and father have recently come back to us, and it is terrible that I buried them, they could have stayed here but now they have spent all this time making their way back. I should have let them stay here.’ Jane’s voice gets louder, more shrill, her hands tightly clasped together.
William’s aware of Muir moving closer to the woman in case she might go for him. He frowns, perplexed, attempting to clarify Jane’s words. He thinks of the unsmiling couple, photographs contained within the silver locket. ‘Your parents are dead? But they have now returned? You’ll need to help me understand.’
Jane Stirling’s voice rises in a whine that becomes a diatribe bordering on raving. ‘How dare you come into our home invade our private world you cannot take her she will return in five years just like mother and father you fools! I know you think I am mad – ’ She gulps for breath, taking her burning eyes from William and casting them on Muir, who is visibly shocked, ‘I suppose I cannot blame you I felt mad when I heard their voices they came back yes they did I tried to sleep but there was no sleep but they are here and I am no longer alone! The dead can return to us! They – are – here!’ Her breath is hot, and William feels the air in the room move.
Back in his office at Bell Street, William sighs and reaches for his fountain pen to finish his notes. It’s after 2am and his bones are weary for rest, but his mind needs to process the day before shutting off. He thinks of Jane and the look of fear and disdain she gave him as she left the police station for onward travel to the Asylum. He knows little of the inner workings of Gartnavel Royal, but its reputation lingers in his imagination – a place of horror and supposed rest and possible cure. How will this disturbed woman fare? What else could he do? These thoughts sit heavily with him as he tries to write up his observations. The intensity of the woman’s delusion is still with him.
He must acquaint himself with the place and makes a note to arrange a visit. In his work, there are as many souls in need of this manner of repair as well as physical help. His mind drifts to his mother and the depth of grief he felt after her death. He would still give anything to have her return to him, to speak to her again; it is not so very mad to imagine it, after all. Closing his notebook, he pictures Jane, by now hopefully admitted to the Asylum, sleeping amongst strangers, no longer alone. He hopes they treat her well. He’s unsure if she will ever make it home.
Returning to the World: A Reflection on Process
I am always intrigued where the stories begin in case notes. Compelled by the moments when people turn into patients. Where lives and experiences are transformed into scenes and symptoms of illness.
My process of working with these materials begins by connecting to the details they portray:
We begin with a date – December 22nd 1877. I am transported to thoughts of Christmas and a cold Glasgow winter.
We are given a name and an age – Jane Stirling or Crawford, age 52 years. I feel instantly connected. A human shadow of a woman appears in mind.
We are given a beginning – ‘Was brought to the asylum today’. Such a small statement with such monumental impacts.
The journey to asylum is an often skipped over moment in the history of asylums and psychiatry. Yet I often think about that experience. That day Jane was taken from her home to the police station and then transported to Gartnavel asylum. She encountered numerous people and experienced varying emotions during this journey yet nothing of this is charted in these records. It is another forgotten moment in the lives of mental health care, a slippery set of encounters that appear too insignificant to note. Yet, this day was life changing for Jane. The spaces she walked out of and into altered every aspect of her existence. These lived geographies matter.
‘On admission she was quiet and knew she was in an asylum but was indignant at being sent to such a place’
What did it feel like for Jane to be led through the doors of Gartnavel asylum and into the inner spaces of the hospital? Did her heartbeat loudly as she walked up the front steps? Was she afraid or did she feel numb from the unusual nature of her experience? Who else did she see that day as she was led down the long corridors, as she stepped slowly into 3 and a half years of incarceration?
‘Go away, go away’
We know little about Jane as a person but are given fleeting details about her existence as a patient. The only words we hear of Jane’s are used to show her lack of cooperation with the system and those that surround her in this strange new world. She is labelled increasingly irritable, evasive, and scolding as the months and years of asylum life ticks by. She occupies her time through knitting and walking around the grounds.
‘Relieved’
The end of the story is always just another beginning.
A phrase that intrigues me from the case notes is that of ‘returning to the world’; what Jane believed her parents had done after their death and that her sister would do. I think about the process of working with patient case notes and it strikes me that this is what they help us to do: they help us to return these individuals back to life. Yet, how do you return these patients and their lived experiences back to the contemporary world? What possibilities and pitfalls does doing so achieve?
This project is about ‘writing the asylum,’ yet it remains somewhat an impermeable place. The large case note files, scribbled with recollections from history, entomb experiences of others for us to see. Yet the secrets they hold are far greater than the tales they tell. However, it is within the margins and the silences of these records that critical spaces of understanding emerge. Gaps that force us into questioning the unknowable.
So, how to write about Jane? What are the fleshy realities of her life revealed in the snapshot of existence presented in these case notes? What are the differences between that which is described and what is really lived in these asylum worlds? The creative component of this project allows us to create new worlds, giving creative licence to push the boundaries of what can be known. I want to take this opportunity to explore Jane’s worlds beyond and through the asylum. The space of the police office, briefly mentioned in the case notes, captures my imagination and connects me to my interest in nineteenth century police surgeons. A figure who enters the worlds of others at their darkest moments. I want to take us back to the scene of death to explore the spaces of Jane’s grief. Something that strikes me as so raw yet unmentioned in the documents. Imagining Jane’s home and events that happened there offer a way to think about her journey to asylum in its broadest sense. Case notes begin when a person becomes a patient, but it is what has happened to them as a person that has brought them to the asylum’s door. Giving space to Jane’s world through a creative reimagining of her journey has given me the opportunity to go beyond the walls of the asylum, to enter new worlds and ways of knowing the person, and to develop a stronger sense of humanity for writing the histories of mental ill-health.
[Patient record for Jane Stirling, HB13/5/98]
Cheryl McGeachan is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Glasgow. Her work specialises in exploring the lived worlds of mental ill-health from a variety of historical and contemporary perspectives. As a passionate collaborator she works in partnership with people and collections in order to attempt to understand the lived geographies of mental ill-health and their worldly configurations. Cheryl has worked with mental health charities, museum curators, artists, individuals with lived experience of mental ill-health, storytellers, prison educators, mental health nurses, archivists and creative writers to unearth the histories and geographies of asylum and post-asylum spaces, paying acute attention to the experiential nature of being-in and living through such times and places. She has published widely on the subject of mental ill-health, including reflections on Art Extraordinary and outsider art, R.D. Laing, and Scottish asylum spaces. Recent collaborative work with the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow has extended existing shared work on mental ill-health to consider aspects of crime and violence through the figure of the Scottish police surgeon. Through this collaboration both have been moved and challenged by the troubling nature of (re)telling stories of crime and violence and have looked to creative modes of telling for inspiration and insight.