Abstract

In painting portraits, artists used to subtly place objects which reflected the biography or ambitions of the subject, but it is only more recently that objects which were part of the everyday life of institutionalized individuals became themselves part of the narratives offered by historians and other scholars of psychiatry. Excavating these remains – and finding ways to listen to them – is part of telling a fuller story of the people who lived for many years in mental institutions, and indirectly of madness as both part of medical science, and a figment of our culture.