My Asylum (e-book) (used book) | Joe Hughes | bookbook.eu

Description

Joe Hughes revisits his thirty year nursing and demanding trade union careers at St Francis Psychiatric Hospital at Haywards Heath in Sussex and produces a well researched history which at times is controversial but also humorous and always enjoyable. This is a local history and memoir with a difference. *Read of the old hospital's ghostly Grey Lady who is said to still haunt the corridors of the new Southdowns Park *Wonder at how a nurse found his car on one of the hospital's wards on April Fool's day *Be surprised and shocked at the hospital's speeding ambulance driver as he loses a patient's white shrouded corpse in the snow *Relive national medical history as Dr Charles Lockhart Robertson, the first medical superintendent, initiated the use of Turkish baths in psychiatric treatment in England *Gain new insights into the often strained relationship, spread over many decades, between COHSE (Unison) and management before and during the hospital's closing process. These and many more little known facts and stories emerge from the time the doors of the hospital opened in 1859. Built to house just 400 patients at a cost of £46,531.16s.10d it carried out its work for 136 years until, in November 1995, it closed to fund and make way for advances in the community based care of the mentally ill.