Friday Update Number Twenty

Posted on 20 August 2020

This week we’ve been turning our attention back to our hospital patient indexes and The Retreat Letter Project, adding more than 3,000 new entries to our online catalogue which detail the lives and experiences of men and women receiving psychiatric care in 19th century York.

We first mentioned The Retreat Letter Project in our second Friday update back in April. The project aims to list and describe thousands of letters in the archive of The Retreat hospital relating to patients and their families, dating from the earliest days of the hospital in the late 18th century. The descriptions have been created by a group of volunteers and then arranged and imported into Borthcat by Alexandra Medcalf. As you might imagine, this is an enormous task and the work is still ongoing, but thanks to their hard work you can now read details of letters received in 1796, 1797, 1798, 1799 and 1800, with links to digitised copies of the originals so you can read the full letters for yourselves.

In addition The Retreat Letters Project a group of volunteers from the York and District Family History Society have given many hours of their time to the task of indexing patient case books from The Retreat, Bootham, and Clifton hospitals in York. In May Alexandra, Lydia Dean and Sally-Anne Shearn completed the rearrangement and import of this data for The Retreat into Borthcat, adding full indexes for patient case books and case books of voluntary boarders comprising the personal details of thousands of patients. Now we are pleased to announce the addition of the first ten Female Case Books for Clifton Hospital, covering the period 1857-1898. Each indexed entry contains key biographical information, drawn from the full case notes, including name, age, occupation, marital status, next of kin, and details of any previous admission to the hospital or other hospitals.

The Clifton indexes provide an interesting contrast to those of The Retreat. Clifton was the county asylum for ‘pauper’ or ordinary working class patients while The Retreat was a private fee paying institution catering to wealthier patients. This contrast is reflected in the occupations of the patients and their institutional history. An example of an index entry from Clifton Hospital can be seen here.

The addition of these new index entries takes our total number of new archival descriptions on Borthcat to just over 18,000, an impressive milestone for our 20th weekly update! That’s more than 3000 new entries a month since we began retroconversion work in March. We’ll be continuing work on The Retreat Letters Project and the Clifton Hospital patient indexes and will be sure to keep you updated.