
For Pinal and Tuke, the interest of patient art lay in the act of creation, rather than in the final product, and neither saw fit to reproduce their patients' drawings to accompany their own texts. John Haslam, however, apothecary at the notorious Bethlem hospital in London, may have been the first to reproduce patiend drawings, in his Illustrations of Madness, in 1810. For Haslam the drawings were of diagnostic interest, their reproduction designed to illustrate the insanity of his patient, one James Tilly Matthews. Matthews suffered apparently from the common schizophrenic delusion of persecution and believed that he was being conspired against, and acted against, by a version of the 'influencing machine'. His drawings of the machine, which he termed an 'air-loom' (fig. 1), derive clearly from the mechanical aesthetics of the early industrial age.
University of California Press, 1996, Berkeley, 0-520-21740-3
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