‘The Modern Asylum has Long Passed the Prison Workhouse Stage, and its Work Demands Recognition as a Mental Hospital in Every Sense of the Word’

In February 1901, the eminent asylum architect George T. Hine presented a lengthy paper titled ‘Asylums and Asylum Planning’ to the Royal Institute of British Architects. Asylum construction was, he contended, ‘a special branch of architecture’ because ‘asylums are built for people who cannot take care of themselves, and who have to be watched, nursed, and provided with employment and recreation under conditions inapplicable to sane people’. He cited plans for the East Sussex Asylum when outlining his vision for a new type of public asylum which, in this case, included an acute hospital for eighty patients that would be nearly half a mile from the main asylum building (itself holding 840 patients of all classes); four detached villas containing thirty patients each; and ‘a block for sixty idiot and imbecile children’. This indicated a distinct move towards an approach that was ostensibly more patient-centric, away from the old style of building, which accommodated patients according to the institutional resources required to manage them (for example, more attendants worked on refractory wards for disturbed patients than on those for ‘quiet and chronic’ patients). Previously, patients admitted for disorders that were believed to be curable might live beside those who had chronic and congenital conditions.