If Asylum Walls Could Speak

Sandy embarked on her mental health nursing career in Parkside Hospital in 1964 as a naive seventeen-year-old child and stepped into another world—a world of entrenched culture, such as the deep division of the sexes and women incarcerated for infidelity and labelled morally insane, doomed to spend the rest of their lives in the asylum. Pencil baths, gang showers, and group bathing and how a young window cleaner saw more than he expected to and fled. The stately matron in her crisply starched whites and fearsome charge nurses who evoked terror among the junior staff. Sandy relates hilarious tales of bodies being transported in the dead of night to the hospital mortuary by some very unconventional means. The camaraderie and the close-knit community of the hospital made it a home to many but asylum to most. With 1,300 beds and the ridiculous ratio of fifty patients to one nurse on night duty, she still had time to knit between rounds. Sandy rolled up her sleeves and got on with the job, and fifty years later, she is still rolling with the punches—literally.