Registers of Lunatics and General Register

There are four Registers of Lunatics for Crichton Royal Institution, 1839-1887; four Registers of Lunatics for Southern Counties Asylum, 1839-1894; and two large General Registers, 1840-1962. These ten registers contain: date of any previous admissions, admission number, patient name, sex, class (i.e. private or pauper), age, marital status, occupation, place of residence, county or parish to which chargeable (i.e. if pauper patient, who is responsible for paying their board), name of person who authorised their admission, names of the two doctors signing the medical certificates, physical condition of patient, name, form and cause of mental disorder, details of previous illness, date of discharge, removal or death, condition on discharge (i.e. recovered, relieved, not improved, died), and any further observations (e.g. where or into whose care discharged to, cause of death, etc). There are several date overlaps and gaps in these volumes, with it being unclear in some cases as to when the volumes were created. Also when new registers were started the names of patients who were still resident at the date registers were begun were transferred into the new register (e.g. register started in 1884 contains names of patients admitted as early as 1840) or, in the case of the Southern Counties Asylum registers, the transfer of names of patients admitted as paupers into Crichton Royal Asylum between 1839 and 1848, prior to opening of Southern Counties Asylum. The admission numbers alter several times with new numbering systems being adopted, due to the inclusion of voluntary patients in some of these registers and the adoption of a single numbering system in November 1884 when Crichton Royal Institution and Southern Counties Asylum amalgamated to become the First and Second Houses of the Crichton Royal Institution. Registers are arranged in date order with the four volumes relating to Crichton Royal Institution first, followed by those for Southern Counties Asylum and then the two large general registers. Covering dates relate to dates of admission of patients listed in the registers.

1839-1962

10 volumes

Enquiries for reproduction for commercial purposes should be directed to the Archivist, Dumfries and Galloway Archives and Local Studies

The papers are available at Dumfries and Galloway Archives subject to conditions of UK Data Protection Act 1998, Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 and NHS Records Management Code of Practice 2012. Subject to these restrictions, this material is being digitised by the University of Glasgow as part of a Wellcome Trust funded project. Material that is digitised will be accessed freely online through the Wellcome Library catalogue.