“An elderly woman wearing a bonnet, identified as Nancy Farrar, from Horbury, West Yorkshire. She was admitted to the West Riding Asylum in June 1852 as a forty-five year old single mill hand. She was said to have been suffering from melancholia for about 12 months. This photograph of Nancy was taken in 1873 when she would have been 66 years old. In August that year her physician wrote: “Patient is getting much thinner though her mental condition is unchanged. She is under the impression that everyone about wishes to injure her and that she is consumed by the fire inside her.” Nancy’s health deteriorated with age and she passed away in the Asylum in June 1886. — records in the West Yorkshire Archive Service, Wakefield, Yorkshire, identified by David Scrimgeour, op. Cit.”

For a primary source I found a photograph of Nancy Farrar, a resident of West Yorkshire who was admitted to a mental hospital when she was 45. Ms. Farrar was admitted to the West Riding Asylum in June of 1852, with the reason suffering from melancholia or as we now call it, depression. At the time of the photo she had been inside the asylum for 21 years since the first day she arrived at West Riding. You can see from the photo how she looks like any normal person from the time period would have looked like, and I have seen people that look reminiscent of this woman. In August of 1873 her physician stated that Nancy was getting much thinner and her mental state remained unchanged. Nancy believed that everyone wished to injure her and that she was consumed by the fire inside of her. Nancy suffered from her depression and the conditions of the mental asylum until June of 1886, 34 years after first walking through the doors of West Riding Asylum. Nancy lived through a time when people that suffered from mental illnesses were given inhumane treatment and forced to live pretty awful lives. West Riding Asylum opened in 1818 and closed in 1995, through these years it was originally fashioned to house 150 patients but by the time of Nancy’s stay it had grown to accommodate at least 650 patients within the same building. Although the hospital did run completely self sufficient and allow patients to partake in outdoor activities and picnics, at the time they had employed treatments that are now considered inhumane. Such “treatments” included bleeding, blistering, and purging were most common for patients to go through, other treatments of the time such as lobotomies were becoming popular at the end of Nancy’s stay. Although I do not know much about Nancy, it can be assumed that she was a very poor person of the time as the West Riding housed all people that came from poverty.  I chose this photo because it is interesting to see how “normal” a person can look on the outside but you may never know the mental anguish that can toil on a person’s mind.

https://wellcomecollection.org/works/w4rp6q7s