Poverty and Illness in the 'Old Countries': archaeological approaches to historical medical institutions in the British Isles.

Since the 1990s, archaeological approaches to institutions designed for public health, benefit, and welfare have been developed. Key publications have raised the profile of ‘institutional’ archaeology in North America and Australia, while archaeology-based, and built-environment focused, research in the British Isles has gained momentum. These buildings continue to be grouped under the category of ‘institutional’ architecture, alongside prisons and institutions for confinement, but in light of recent scholarship, homogenisation of institutional buildings is no longer so useful. Focusing on the British Isles, this paper outlines archaeological methodologies that set British and Irish approaches within their unique context, highlighting the distinctiveness of different building types. Focusing on two institutional building types, the asylum and the hospital, the significant difference between these building types and those frequently considered analogous becomes apparent

Ghosts of Sorrow, Sin and Crime: Dark Tourism and Convict Heritage in Van Diemen’s Land, Australia.

Established as a British imperial penal colony, Van Diemen’s Land received approximately 75,000 convicts before cessation of convict transportation in 1853. A vast network of penal stations and institutions were created to accommodate, employ, administer, and discipline these exiled felons. Popular interpretations of Australia’s convict past highlight dynamics of shame, avoidance and active obliteration that characterized Australia’s relationship to its recent convict past. Yet, closer examination of these colonial institutions suggests a far more ambivalent relationship with this ‘dark heritage’, evidenced by continuous tourism and visitation to these places of pain and shame from the mid-19th century to the present day

Out of sound, out of mind: noise control in early nineteenth-century lunatic asylums in England and Ireland

This article examines the rhetoric and design principles invested in public lunatic asylum architecture in the early nineteenth century. Using case studies from England and Ireland, this article will focus on the creation of a sensory environment conducive to the reform of these institutions, and how this was applied – intentionally or otherwise – in the built environment. Objections to door locks and the noise made by footsteps testify to the weight placed on the importance of the patient’s sensory well-being. It will be argued these initial features of sound control were bound up in a paternalistic, yet moral, approach to insanity and reform, with varying degrees of success