Mapping madness: HGIS and the analysis of Irish patient records

The Connaught District Lunatic Asylum (CDLA) opened at Ballinasloe, Co. Galway in 1833 as one of the first of a nationwide network of Irish District Asylums. Intended to serve the curable pauper lunatics of the counties of Mayo, Sligo, Leitrim, Galway, and Roscommon, the institution found itself at the heart of significant social, economic, and political change in the West of Ireland. From its opening, the asylum maintained a full and complex series of records that provide an exceptional level of detail on a cohort – the very poor and illiterate population of Connaught – who otherwise often lived and died unrecorded on the margins of Irish society. The CDLA admission records include information on age, sex, occupation, education, religion, marital status, places of origin and residence, migration, and family structures as well as the medical information, both mental and physical, required for treatment in the asylum. This paper will examine the potential benefits of implementing spatial epidemiological methods into historical studies of mental illness. Using a database of patient records this paper will conduct a demographic analysis of a sample of the population of the CDLA. The paper will outline the process of transforming the data extracted from these records into visual maps using Historical GIS (HGIS). Using the geographic co-ordinates of these two locations, the unique patterns of movement of those that entered the asylum can be mapped using GIS. These maps enable the examination of the socio-spatial processes which affected the marginalised population of the asylum. (The sources used in this paper come from the Connaught District Lunatic Asylum records, held at the National Archives of Ireland in Dublin. As the material is drawn from committal warrants of patients admitted in 1889, it falls outside of the ‘100 year rule’ for accessing sensitive historic patient information in Ireland.)