Christian Watt's guest appearances

Christian Watt

History of Psychiatry Podcast Series

William Cowper

Alice Hill

Chris Williams

John Ross

Uta Frith

Rory O'Connor

Danny Smith

Ruth Allen

Chris Frith

Hugh Blair

John Phillip

Fionnuala Williams

Herman Charles Merivale

James Boswell

Hannah Allen

OwlTail

This extract accompanies Podcast 18 - Being an asylum patient 4: Christian Watt at Aberdeen Royal Mental Asylum, 1877SOURCE: The Christian Watt papers. Edited with an introduction by David Fraser (Edinburgh, 1983), 106-8. A newer, corrected edition is published by Birlinn.http://www.birlinn.co.uk/The-Christian-Watt-Papers-9781780270722.html	Voice Credit: Oli Savage

This extract accompanies Podcast 18 - Being an asylum patient 4: Christian Watt at Aberdeen Royal Mental Asylum, 1877 SOURCE: The Christian Watt papers. Edited with an introduction by David Fraser (Edinburgh, 1983), 106-8. A newer, corrected edition is published by Birlinn. <a href="http://www.birlinn.co.uk/The-Christian-Watt-Papers-9781780270722.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.birlinn.co.uk/The-Christian-Watt-Papers-9781780270722.html</a> 	 Voice Credit: Oli Savage

Extract 18.1 - Christian Watt

As I showed last week, Herman Charles Merivale’s time at Ticehurst was a bit like being in a nice hotel, though he did not like the other ‘guests’. Someone who seems to have settled rather better into an institutional environment was a working class Aberdeenshire woman, who also wrote a retrospective account of her time in a public asylum. She wrote with frankness and sensitivity, about both herself and her fellow patients, making the best of her prolonged stay, which lasted 45 years. However, it is also clear that she re-wrote much of what happened, including the frightening circumstances of delusion and arson, which had caused her to be admitted in the first place.

18. Being an asylum patient 4: Christian Watt at Aberdeen Royal Mental Asylum, 1877