A lot of people tend to assume I have some sort of a degree in computing, life sciences, archaeology or archival studies, history even, and while it’s true to say I’ve spent time working in jobs associated with these fields, my actual degree is in psychology.

Might seem strange, but that’s how it is, and while my psychology years are long behind me I’ve retained an interest in the treatment of the brain damaged and mentally ill in the nineteenth century.

And the nineteenth century is an interesting time, because it saw the first large scale attempts to treat the mentally ill and those with brain injuries, even if, in the case of larger public institutions it was usually a case of “lock’em up and shut’em up”.

Of course it wasn’t all sweetness and light – in England, and other British Empire territories, there was the abuse of the Lunacy Acts to lock up inconvenient and difficult women – even Dickens considered having his wife Catherine locked up in an asylum so that he could have a free and open relationship with his mistress.

At the same time there were institutions such as Sunnyside Hospital in Scotland where there appears to have been a genuine desire to treat the patients rather than simply seclude them from society.

Five or six years before the Crimean war, in the US there was the notable case of Phineas Gage, the railroad worker who survived horrific brain injuries and recovered to the extent he was able to support himself despite some personality changes following the injury.

Today, we would use his case as an example of neural plasticity, but at the time the emphasis was more on the changes in behaviour following his injury.

A few years ago, while researching something else, I came across a report from 1856 in the Scotsman – then the newspaper of the Edinburgh establishment and Scottish gentry – which seemed to suggest that not only were there officers being treated in the Royal Edinburgh Asylum for brain injuries sustained during the Crimean war, but that there might even be an early case of what we might characterise as PTSD.

There is also some evidence from Florence Nighingale’s correspondence that she recognised that soldiers in the Crimea suffered from not just physical trauma, but mental distress as well and that affected their recovery.

Now there has been relatively little work on the occurrence of PTSD like symptoms, or the consequences of brain trauma in nineteenth century conflicts – army medical doctors were perhaps not the most caring, and army medical records are not necessarily complete or accurate – in the case of the lower ranks, there’s a suggestion that some army doctors were creative with their diagnosis to ensure that men discharged on medical grounds – which meant some illness or injury, rather than “malingering”, were discharged in a way that guaranteed them an army pension, however small.

In the case of officers, I’m not sure, but certainly the evidence of the report in the Scotsman suggests that some at least were treated in a mental hospital after their return.

This is something that I always meant to follow up on and investigate further, but never did, until a post on Mastodon alerted me to the Florence Nightingale digitisation project.

The idea behind the project was quite simple.

Over her lifetime, Florence Nightingale wrote thousands of letters, certainly upwards of 3000, and because these letters were from Florence Nightingale, people kept them, and then later generations kept and collected them, meaning that a lot of her letters eventually ended up in libraries and archives.

The idea behind the project was to digitise them and reunite them online making the whole of her correspondence available for research.

The project appears to have started with high hopes and to have excited quite a few institutions as in these posts from Leeds University and Derbyshire records office.

There’s only one problem – the links to the digital archive site are dead. The site certainly existed – the wayback machine shows it was certainly up and running at the end of 2019, but it drops out of the record in early 2022.

Which is a bit annoying.

It looks as if the site simply went away. A quick hunt and click seems to show that most of digitised content is still online via the various host institutions, but what is lost is the ability to search across the corpus of her correspondence.

There seems to be an initiative on the part of the Howard Gottleib Archival Research Centre in Boston to bring the archive back together, but so far, nothing.

So, why do I care?

Well, having started on this dilettante project to investigate mental trauma among the survivors of the Crimean war, I thought a good way would be to look at who she wrote to about mental trauma, and possibly brain injury during the Crimean War period and immediately thereafter, and then follow up on her correspondents – even such information which can be gleaned from family history sites that Dr Someone was working at a mental hospital can be useful.

Unfortunately, at the moment that’s clearly not to be – I’ll have to come up with another line of attack …