- Wikidata identifier:
- Q5569343
- Also known as:
- Glenside Museum
- Instance of:
- museum; hospital museum
- Museum/collection status:
- Accredited museum
- Accreditation number:
- 2347
- Persistent shareable link for this record:
- https://museumdata.uk/museums/q5569343/
Collection-level records:
-
Collection history (Collection development policy)
The collection was established in 1984 by Dr Donal Early, a Consultant Psychiatrist at Glenside Hospital, Dennis Griffiths, and Gwyn Birt. In 1992 the collection moved from the main psychiatric hospital building, which had closed as a hospital to become a medical training centre, to its current location in the former church that was built in 1881 for the patients of Bristol’s purpose-built asylum. The collection was extended by Peter Carpenter and John Pimm to include medical and other artefacts from the Stoke Park Colony which broadened the focus to incorporate the learning difficulties hospitals.
Source: Collection development policy
Date: 2024
Licence: CC BY-NC
-
Collection overview (Collection development policy)
The museum is unique, set in the context of the Grade II listed church, and has a collection specific to three local hospitals that is significant in the understanding of mental health care. Dr Early collected significant and eclectic objects, photographs, papers, and drawings on the subject of mental health from the 1800s through to the 1990s. The collection has continued to expand. In addition to mental health, it also encompasses the development of learning difficulties care over the past 150 years, and a short period during the First World War when the Bristol Asylum became the orthopaedic Beaufort War Hospital.
The museum also increases awareness of the care of mental health patients. GHM has a collection of 80 Denis Reed drawings which illustrate life in a late 1950s-1960s mental health hospital. They depict scenes which could never be photographed, giving a unique and important insight into what the wards were like.
As well as the physical history of mental health, the museum also actively seeks to collate the experiences of those who have a story to tell. GHM has collected c.50 oral histories from staff and ex-patients of Glenside Hospital to date, describing what they experienced.
GHM’s collection includes:
- A range of artefacts and papers from the late 1800s, when county asylums and houses for the care of people with learning difficulties were first formed, to the late 1990s when they were closed.
- A collection of postcards and artefacts from WWI.
- A large ECT collection (with some from the Burden Neurological Institute) .
- Victorian and 1950s strait jackets.
- Nurses’ uniforms.
- Artefacts from the non-medical working life of the hospitals including a fuel pump, laundry items and a clocking in and out machine.
- An extensive photographic collection of the hospitals at various stages of their history.
- Blueprints of the hospital buildings.
Source: Collection development policy
Date: 2024
Licence: CC BY-NC