The UK’s Science Museum has a special online exhibit about the history of mental health and illness that is packed full of fascinating photos and stories.
This rather unpleasant photo from the ‘mental institutions’ section particularly caught my eye. It is labelled “Elderly man in restraint chair, from a series of photographs taken of patients at West Riding Lunatic Asylum, Yorkshire, c. 1869.”
It’s interesting because it bears an interesting resemblance to a famous picture of James Norris, an ‘insane’ US marine who was found by the press to be permanently restrained in Bethlem Royal Hospital (the ‘Bedlam’ asylum) in 1814.
His condition so outraged the public that it was instrumental in a number of reforms to ‘madhouses’ including the 1828 Madhouses Act and the 1845 Lunacy Act.
However, the photo of the elderly gentleman is dated 1869, after both reforms, suggesting that this was either a temporary measure to restrain ‘unruly’ patients, or that the London-centric reforms just didn’t have much effect in the distant provinces of the United Kingdom.
On an unrelated point, the man is described as being a patient at ‘West Riding Lunatic Asylum’ the short name of the ‘West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum’.
British rock band Kasabian recently named their award winning album after the hospital but managed to mangle the name, entitling it ‘West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum’.
Mind Hacks 
Thanks for the info re Science Museum and your post – I worked in an old-fashioned asylum near Manchester in 1976 which had taken in people who’d lived all their lives in appalling conditions like those you link to – and it’s not all that long ago. BTW I would imagine that the “mangling” of ‘West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum’ has something to do with Sean Ryder.
Mangled name or not, it’s still a great album 🙂
http://stanleyroydhospital.fotopic.net/
is on the history of the West Riding Asylum.
The Kaiser Chiefs also wrote a song called ‘High Royds’, as it was also known at one time.
Oddly enough, one of Brian Deer’s first big health stories was on a salmonella outbreak there, which killed 19 patients.