Elizabeth Hardcastle, a patient at the West Riding Lunatic Asylum, Wakefield, Yorkshire. Photograph attributed to James Crichton-Browne, 1872.

A woman, probably with a squint, identified as Elizabeth Hardcastle, from Bramley, West Yorkshire. She was admitted to the West Riding Asylum in April 1872 as a forty year old domestic servant. Her photograph was taken two months later. The Relieving Officer for Bramley provided Elizabeth's recent history: "Patient has always been a weak minded woman but for the last two years her mind has become more effected. Since then she has been at one time violent, at another low spirited. She has been for fourteen years in the Workhouse not having had strength of mind to earn her own living. About three days ago she struck a man, swore she would commit murder and refused to do any more work." Elizabeth would spend six years in the Asylum before being discharged relieved in July 1878. Nowhere in her case notes is there any suggestion that she was suffering from "General Paralysis of the Insane", the annotation on her photograph. -- records in the West Yorkshire Archive Service, Wakefield, Yorkshire, identified by David Scrimgeour, op. cit.