Blog - History

Lectures and conferences are all very well, but space, time and financial restraints often prevent us from getting to as many as we'd like. Step...

Following on from our previous post, we now consider what the game of billiards meant to patients.

This month we look at the gaze of the sitters in Henry Hering's series of photographs of patients at Bethlem.

Here's the first in a short series looking at Billiards at Bethlem.

Here we look at the impact of setting and props in the photographs of Henry Hering.

At the start of the nineteenth century, Bethlem’s Governors began actively seeking new premises for the Hospital.

As mentioned in a recent post to our  In the Frame thread, Oliver Sacks devotes a chapter of his recent book Hallucinations to recounting the...

It’s easy to assume that, once inside in an asylum, Victorian patients had no rights whatsoever. Many were, however, well able to communicate...

One of the aspects that make the Hering collection fascinating is how much they resemble portraits, either painted or photographic, rather than institutional mu

Anyone who has made the trip to the Archives & Museum will know that one of the first things they are invited to do is sign our visitors’ book...

We hope we may be permitted to add a postscript to our reviews of recently-published books concerning Edward Oxford, in order to give context...

This month we look at Bethlem's collection of 'before' and 'after' snapshots.