Annual review : 1994/95 / Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, Department of Western Manuscripts.

  • Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine. Department of Western Manuscripts
Date:
1995
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: Annual review : 1994/95 / Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, Department of Western Manuscripts. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    explains that he was, ‘oblig’d to ask Sr Hans’s advice for an Asthma that I find growing upon me by a constant Residence in London Smoke.’ We also added a lengthy letter to our papers relating to the eighteenth-century botanist and apothecary Richard Pulteney (1730-1801), in which a certain J Sutton describes his recent ill-health to Pulteney. For many in the eighteenth century, of course, illness might be addressed by resorting to Bath to take the waters. In another of the year’s purchases, William Haseldine Pepys (1775-1856), writing to his fellow chemist William Allen (1770-1843), describes his attempts to analyse the Bath waters. Care of the mentally disturbed features in two recently acquired letters. In the earlier, dating from 1745, one Philip Vincent reports back to Sir James Johnstone (1697-1772) on a visit to a mentally ill relative, probably George Johnstone (1720-1792), later third Marquess of Annandale. Vincent’s mis- sion, to assess both the young man’s condition and the suitability of the home to which he has been removed, deep in the Hertfordshire countryside, is informed by the desire to avoid the need for restraint by removing oppor- tunities for self-harm: ‘I doubt the project of draining off the mootes cant well be effected,’ he concludes, but even so, after eight months no accident has happened either by any flight from home or by the water (... [except] but two slight attempts as to the latter wch to this hour I believe proceeded more from petite malice or waggery than despair). ... A similar but more forcibly expressed desire animates the second letter, dating from 1826 and written by a certain Arabella Norfold to a lawyer at Lincoln’s Inn. In it she transcribes a letter she has written to the first Earl of Powis criticizing the care of his mentally disturbed relative William Robinson: ‘were you to see poor William in his present helpless emaciated state, tortured with a mind sensitive beyond description, your lordship would not, could not for a moment harbour the thought of ‘oecion’ or ‘Restraint’ [:] as well you might think of using it towards a Dying Infant because it pined and moaned in its last agony!”