Talk:Friern Hospital

Proposed future addition to article

Image recently released by Wellcome Images on Creative Commons License. The collection is currently in the process of being uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. Add when it's availble through there. http://catalogue.wellcomelibrary.org/record=b1180673 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Superbluefrog (talk • contribs) 15:23, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for this recommendation, @Superbluefrog:. Other editors: eventually the image will appear in commons:Files from Wellcome Library, but the collection is 100,000 in size . It could do with being touched up, but is otherwise an ideal historical image for the article. MartinPoulter Jisc (talk) 15:43, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Now added. MartinPoulter (talk) 01:22, 4 December 2014 (UTC)

Reminder

Reminder to self: Look up The Times 28th Jan 1903, regarding the loss of much life to a large and terrible fire.--Aspro 15:54, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

Proposed correction to article title.

The adjective 'Lunatic' was never used as an attribution to the noun 'asylum' (except perhaps by hacks in the tabloids) when the place name came before it (the asylum is the possessor of the lunatics). This institution certainly never had that title and so I say it is not encyclopaedic to use a vernacular term as the articles title. Any comments as to whether it should just be: Colney Hatch Asylum ?--Aspro 17:37, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

Google Books has 206 hits on "Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum" and 252 hits on "Colney Hatch Asylum". That includes both new and old books. Looking at just older books (pre-1923), there are 115 for "Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum" and 78 for "Colney Hatch Asylum". I'm not sure what all this means, other than people seem to refer to it either way in print, both historically (including professional medical books) and in more recent times. I would say since the Institution was never officially called "Lunatic" (are we sure about that?) that we drop it from the title, but include it as one of the alternative names in the lead section. -- Stbalbach 18:39, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for that Stbalbach. It prompted me to search out a few original documents facsimiles and it seems that even the visiting justices of the peace didn't particularly mind how it was referred to either. As it was their asylums -then that's good enough for me. Maybe I was just being too pedantic, so I'll leave it be. --Aspro 21:06, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

On balance, I do not think it acceptable to leave it be. Why title the page with either name? We can call it Colney Hatch Psychiatric Hospital, because that is what we would call it nowadays, and use both the old titles in the body of the page. This has parallels with casual racist expressions that we would not use nowadays, but which can certainly be documented in an academic context.

By the way, I do not think it relevant whether or not the place still exists, or that it had other names when it was open - it was renamed from 1918 onwards. It is the acceptability of the name as a title page nowadays that matters.

In vernacular Cockney, it became rather genericised as "The Looney Hatch" with very little specific identification in the 1950s-60s, and has spread widely as a result, having lost the specific attribution: again, research Google. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.197.55.141 (talk) 00:48, 17 July 2019 (UTC)

The official name of this institution at the time of its founding was the Middlesex County Pauper Lunatic Asylum -- see here and here and here -- so it is simply untrue to say that "lunatic" was a vernacular term. Colney Hatch was the name of its location, not part of its actual name, but since the name and the institution are apparently coeval, it has stuck with it over the time since. A popularity survey on Google Books is not necessarily going to establish anything; what we need is documented citations giving the institution's proper name, which of course also did change over time. Clevelander96 (talk) 17:07, 3 October 2009 (UTC)

As a p.s. to my previous comment, I believe the naming of the article should follow a convention that applies to all similar institutions -- either a) Use the name by which it was best known over its period of functional existence, while noting its original name and other names in the lede (see Stone House Hospital for an example of one so-named and an entry on which I've done a good deal of work); or b) Consistently use the name which it was first known, or the name by which it was last known prior to closing, but also still give the names and dates of previous incarnations early on in the article. Clevelander96 (talk) 17:20, 3 October 2009 (UTC)

External links modified

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"most modern asylum in Europe"

Glad to see a citation need raised against this phrase, which is vague, depending on what period of time the statement dates to. It would be interesting to know in what context was it considered 'modern' - architecture, clinical standards, living conditions for inmates?Cloptonson (talk) 10:31, 26 March 2016 (UTC)