Gone but not Forgotten: Acts of Remembrance in the Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth-Century Asylum

This chapter analyses two case studies from the casebooks of Holloway Sanatorium, south-east England to explore forgetting and remembrance in the asylum c.1890–1910. The discussion begins by considering two principles: that the asylum is perceived to be a place of forgotten people and that photographs and photography have forgetting, remembrance, and loss at their core. The first case study discusses an example in which staff remembered their patient by preserving an unusual photograph of her. The second considers acts of remembrance between two patients and the photograph that enabled them to remember each other. These examples are analysed through the theoretical framework of family photography to explore the ways in which photographs were, at their heart, objects of remembrance and embedded in networks and relationships between photographic subject, viewer, and place which ensured that patients were not forgotten.