In this post I thought I would give a brief overview of how I have spent the first few months of the project. Due to the size of the collection, the majority of the records are stored in an offsite store, with the more sensitive material being housed at the Archive Centre on Burns Street in Dumfries, so my time is split between these two locations. In the early stages I spent a lot of time researching the hospital and how it fit into the wider context of the provision of care for the mentally ill in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Scotland. This was coupled with identifying which records belonged to the Crichton collection, as it forms part of the larger Dumfries and Galloway Health Service archive and the records are all stored together. This task was aided by the legacy lists produced by the former Health Board Archivist Morag Williams, the scoping study carried out as part of the Wellcome Trust funding bid and assistance from Archivist Graham Roberts, Local Studies and Information Officer Alison Burgess and Assistant in the Archive Centre, Cathy Gibb. I then set about listing the collection box-by-box and cross-referencing with the legacy lists. This allowed me to get to grips with the types of records I would be working with and the extent of the collection.
I also spent some time familiarising myself with the larger runs of records to gain an initial understanding of the information they contained and their function in the running of the hospital. As the collection had been in Morag’s care, many of the records were grouped together, however due to their period of in deep storage a certain amount of disorder had also taken place. So, I have been gradually identifying, and am continuing to do so, groups or series of records and beginning to arrange the collection for cataloguing. This process allows me to see which groups of records will perhaps be more time consuming to catalogue or take longer to fully understand how they fit in the collection as a whole. My time spent on research has been invaluable and enabled me to see how the collection fits together. This research will continue throughout the project as I am discovering more every day. I have also been able to assist Cathy with some of the enquiries she has received relating to former patients and staff at the Crichton Royal. This has been great to see how the records are used by researchers and the types of information they are looking for. In addition to the work I am doing, I must also mention that there is some fantastic work being carried out by volunteers, who are undertaking various indexing and research projects, but there will be more detail about this in future posts.
This summary doesn’t seem like a lot for several months work, but my pages of lists, notes, research and the amount of time I spend talking to anyone who shows the slightest interest in the project suggests otherwise!
The next post will relate to patient admission papers, which I have been on working recently.
Care Not Confinement 