The village asylum for the insane in early 20th century Scotland: An archaeology of environmentalism

The colony institution for the insane poor, in which patient accommodation was segregated into domestic-style ‘villas’, is an unusual form of asylum layout that was prevalent in Scotland around the turn into the twentieth century, although no English/Welsh general asylum for the insane adopted this layout before the First World War. The historiographical orthodoxy holds that, due to an increasing therapeutic pessimism deriving from an understanding of insanity as hereditary, asylums of the late nineteenth century had simply become ‘warehouses’ for the sequestering of the unwanted. It is further argued that colony institutions for the ‘feeble-minded’ were constructed as a cheap way of preventing the reproduction of the ‘unfit’ by removing them to rural locations. An archaeological, i.e. materially-focussed, analysis of the colony asylum problematizes these contentions. The colony asylum was built with considerable attention to questions of hygiene, in particular ventilation and the admission of light to buildings. The segregation of patient accommodation into villas also allowed a more domestic or ‘home-like’ character with regard to architecture, interior spaces and furnishings. The requirement for accommodation to be domestic, in a bourgeois sense, sometimes led to considerable (and controversial) expense. It will be argued that the colony asylum reflects contemporary concerns with racial degeneration and represents an attempt to provide idealised environments, both in hygienic terms, but also in terms of the disaggregation of bodies in order to release vitality.