In the previous section you saw Howard Mitchell looking at a number of different documents, now deposited in archives, which show the kind of regime that operated at Lennox Castle for most of the time it existed. But documents tell only one side of the story. Apart from the official story of the hospital?s origins, there are details of visits, punishments, patient notes and daily incidents reported by nurses on their shifts. As Mitchell pointed out when he was interviewed while the film was being made in 1996:
(Howard Mitchell, interview, 1996)As far as the patients are concerned I think the documentary evidence concerning them only illustrates a patient?s life who might be a problem in some ways, or whose life is filled with … incidents that are recorded. It doesn?t tell you very much about the day to day life, the day to day workings of a patient who doesn?t present many problems.
What is missing from the documents Mitchell mentions is any feeling for how the residents, or the ‘patients? as they were called, felt about living at Lennox Castle. Nor do we get any sense of what it was like to work there, in the early years and later. One obvious way to find out is to ask people to recall the time they spent there. This is what Mitchell also did when he carried out the oral history side of his research into the history of Lennox Castle Hospital.
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