Visualising Idiocy, Visualising Caterham

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the use of patient photographs or portraits as they were referred to at Caterham, in the study of asylums. It considers the ways in which photographs and visual records provide an insight into the inner world of the asylum, its material culture, treatment of patients and, importantly what people admitted to Caterham looked like. It considers the multiple roles that photographs or portraits played in the asylum, how they were used as forms of administrative record keeping, part of the treatment of patients and a feature of the wider asylum entertainment regime. It also considers how historians of medicine, asylums and insanity can use visual records to explore the interactions, intimacy and emotion exhibited and experienced within the institutional setting. Finally, the chapter considers the important point that these images show how doctors and Caterham’s staff viewed idiocy, imbecility and incurable insanity in the period before the passing of the Mental Deficiency Act, arguing that deviance and degeneration, regarded as being key lenses through which idiocy was viewed, were markedly absent.