Lennox Castle Hospital existed only for about sixty years, but was typical of institutions created in the early twentieth century for people with learning disabilities. In this activity you?ll see the kind of place it was, the rules and forms of control that existed, for both residents and staff, and the information that is available in the archives about the ways in which lives were managed.
From these assets you should be able to judge to what extent Lennox Castle matches Goffman?s idea of the total institution that you read about in Activity 2. You should also gain an idea of the philosophy that led to the building of a place like Lennox Castle, and what can be learned about the lives of residents and staff from various kinds of evidence available today.
All the filming and recording of Lennox Castle and the people who lived and worked there was done in 1996 and in 2007. The early filming, of Howard Mitchell driving around the site, visiting the archives and interviewing Margaret Scally, James Lappin and Colin Sproul, was made for a film that accompanied an earlier version of the course K101 An introduction to health and social care. In 1996 Margaret had left and was living in Glasgow, James was still a resident and Colin was retired and living in nearby Lennoxtown.
When we came back to see what had changed, we were only able to re-interview Margaret Scally but asked Howard and his colleague, Allan Williamson, to talk about their memories of working as nurses at the hospital. The lapse of time is interesting for what it shows about changes, but perhaps more important is the evidence from the 1996 film. This is now a unique record of what the hospital looked like. Many of the photographs included in the interactive map are from a collection put together by Howard Mitchell when he was employed by the hospital trust to make a visual and oral record of the hospital and its closure.
For this task you have two items to look at:
To what extent did Lennox Castle Hospital resemble Goffman?s idea of a ‘total institution?? What did you see in the film or find on the map to confirm that it could be characterised by:
First view the film. Then watch again and as you do fill in the boxes below. You?ll see that the boxes cover Goffman?s four characteristics of a ‘total institution? in the left-hand column.
Interactive content appears here. Please visit the website to use it.Transcript
Characteristics
Batch living: People are treated as if they are all the same, without any individuality and controlled by strict rules so that there is little freedom.
Interactive content appears here. Please visit the website to use it.People living 60 to a villa; eating together as group of 600 people; being entertained in a large group; men?s and women?s accommodation designed identically.
Binary management: Staff and ‘inmates? are controlled and kept separate by two different sets of rules and treat each other with suspicion, with staff feeling superior and inmates inferior.
Interactive content appears here. Please visit the website to use it.Plenty of strict rules for both staff and residents. Staff could be disciplined for crossing the football pitch; the ‘demarcation line? between the men?s and women?s sections applied to staff as well as the residents in the early days; staff wore uniforms which distinguished them from the residents and which gave them a medical appearance; staff lived in segregated accommodation, men apart from women and higher and lower ranks separated.
Residents were strictly controlled as they moved about the grounds; they worked in workshops next to the wards they lived in.
The inmate role: People are stripped of their past lives and lose the identity and previous roles they had before entering the institution. This happens on admission when someone may have what is personal taken from them and instead are given the identity that the institution has decided on.
Interactive content appears here. Please visit the website to use it.The Book of Lennox Castle refers to the residents as ‘the mentally defective class? (p. 19), ‘suffering from mental disorders? (p. 22) and as ‘the mentally sick? (p. 35). There seems to be an assumption that segregation of some people is appropriate. You saw a rule about how to bath people that suggests that residents may not always have been treated as individuals.
The institutional perspective: The institution?s way of life takes over and determines the way in which inmates and staff experience and understand their lives ? often through events and activities designed to create a sense of community.
Interactive content appears here. Please visit the website to use it.The Book of Lennox Castle is full of praise for the new hospital, the ‘up-to-date methods? of its construction and honours the far-sightedness of the Parish of Glasgow (p.35) in building the hospital. However, it also mentions ‘sympathy? (p. 19) for the ‘unfortunates? (p. 22). These feelings of pride and pity will have affected how residents in the hospital were treated. Isolated in the Scottish hills and within the extensive grounds a sense of community seems to have been created through the staging of entertainment, concerts, films and dancing for the residents, as well as sport, including football competitions for the staff.
Not a ‘total institution??
Interactive content appears here. Please visit the website to use it.There doesn?t seem to be much evidence to the contrary but you might have wondered if staff living on ‘The Oval? were managing to live some kind of independent life even though the accommodation was well within the hospital?s grounds. Did the presence for a while of a maternity hospital mean that Lennox Castle was less ‘total? during those years at least?
If out of personal interest you would like to see more of The Book of Lennox Castle, you can find the complete book online.
Next, look at the interactive map of Lennox Castle, which can be seen at the link below. Click on the various hotspots and note down any other evidence of the four characteristics, then return to this page.
View When you?ve finished filling in the boxes, think back again to what you saw in the film and on the map. Was there anything that made you think this might not have been such a ‘total? institution? Note down anything that made you question this label.
You?ve begun to consider what life was like at Lennox Castle Hospital by looking at a film showing its landscape and a map highlighting some of its features. In many ways it seems as if this is an example of a ‘total institution?. There?s little evidence that it wasn?t. You may have more to say about this after you?ve completed the next three activities.
Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence
