The madness museum.

Dramatic historical reconstruction of a day in the life of a Victorian private lunatic asylum. A young doctor arrives to take up his post at the asylum and is introduced to its customs and inmates by its governor, the Rev. Dr. James Benignus Skipton, who runs the institution with benign tyranny and great pride. But Skipton's own sanity is shown to be only relative and the bizarre tour reaches a conclusion in which sanity concedes to madness in the interests of survival. Horror and humour enliven a long and occasionally tedious film in which, however, the paraphernalia of restraint and the theories and practices of the time are clearly demonstrated and explained. The advantage of the dramatic reconstruction method is that the patients' situation can also be appreciated.