The Hollow Gardener and Other Stories: Reason and Relation in the Work Cure

Abstract

Some years ago, a patient much afflicted with melancholic and hypochondriacal symptoms was admitted by his own request. The patient was by trade a gardener, and the superintendent immediately perceived the propriety of keeping him employed … .1 It was by serendipity rather than planning that the opening of the Oxford symposium for which I first drafted a version of this paper fell almost to the day on the two hundredth anniversary of Samuel Tuke’s Description of the Retreat Near York, published June 1813, in which it is declared that of all methods to coax the melancholic patient back to reality and reason, work was to be regarded both the most effective and efficacious. As is well known in the history of psychiatry, the Description of the Retreat: An Institution Near York for Insane Persons of the Society of Friends, is the detailed and often lively account of the enigmatic Quaker Retreat in North Yorkshire, England, at which moral treatment – and thus work therapy by association – is widely credited to have had its English origins. Written by Samuel Tuke, grandson of the Retreat’s founder William Tuke, the text has been celebrated as one of the most significant records in the history of psychiatry. Produced with the intention of promoting moral treatment to a wider audience of practitioners and reformers, the text is imbued with glimpses into early nineteenth-century ideologies of work – from the therapeutic work of patients in the asylum’s farm and gardens, to the meticulous ‘workings out’ of the methods of moral treatment so that they might be developed and adopted more broadly.