The neogothic former asylum in Cork, once the longest building in Ireland, now stands as a monument to 19th-century gothic architecture. Known as Cork Mental Hospital or Our Lady’s, it was expanded multiple times before its closure in the 1990s. Today, much of the complex has been converted into apartments, with a developer’s website inviting people to “live comfortably, live conveniently, live with us.” This invitation carries a spectral quality, evoking the restless spirits of the unwell and unwilling who once inhabited the building.
Doireann Ní Ghríofa, a celebrated poet and author of the nonfiction work A Ghost in the Throat, began exploring the derelict site several years ago. She immediately recognized it as a place she might have ended up herself, had history taken a different turn. Her new book, Said the Dead, is an intimately researched yet wildly imaginative study of lives—mostly female—that were lived and often concluded during the hospital’s first 70 years.
Historical Constraints and Archival Voices
The book’s historical span is shaped by official constraints. When Ní Ghríofa delves into the archive, primarily the hospital’s large green casebooks, she must stop reading at a century’s distance to avoid breaching confidentiality. As a result, the Victorian and Edwardian voices she uncovers fall silent in the early years of an independent Ireland. Nevertheless, her notes teem with the names, characters, adventures, and misfortunes of patients.
Among them are Bridget, heavily pregnant, who emigrated to America but was thrown out and sent home by her brother when he discovered her condition. Anna Martha, a painter described as “peculiar in her antics,” pulled a gun on magistrates who sought to commit her. Sixteen-year-old Dora, a great reader of novels beaten into depression by her parents, “wishes to be dead.” Muriel, whose husband was Terence MacSwiney, the republican lord mayor of Cork who died on hunger strike in Brixton prison, also appears. Some names fade quickly from the record, while others stubbornly, mysteriously, or even merrily persist in the archival pages.
The Doctors and the Psychiatrist
Behind these accounts of lives ruined and sometimes recovered are the doctors who treated the women. In the archive, their voices are most forthcoming at the time of admission, recording fears and delusions. For example, one patient “says that fairies work on her nerves … Said she has changed into many shapes since I last saw her. Said that she will be burned soon, and that people are foretelling it.” Affect and intellect are noted with terms like “dull,” “sullen,” “stupid,” or “intelligent.” In many instances, these accounts decline into seemingly careless repetition: “No change.”
In 1896, however, Lucia Strangman arrived at the institution—the first woman qualified as a psychiatrist in the British Isles. She serves as Ní Ghríofa’s double in Said the Dead, a reader of faces, bodies, and letters, a listener to voices on the edge of extinction. Based on the evidence, Lucia appears to have been at the humane, inquiring end of early 20th-century psychiatry.
The Reader’s Role and Ethical Force
Reading is Ní Ghríofa’s way of doing justice to these lives, but it is double-edged—a kind of love and a type of surveillance. Early on, her presence on the page is clear: she is there as an exploring “I,” but sometimes refers to herself as “the Reader,” who presides even over Lucia and her staff, assuming authority and responsibility for all these dead, vivid souls. Ní Ghríofa’s treatment of the patients and their textual remains is never less than sensitive. Like Freud with certain celebrated cases, she uses only first names. Yet the Reader is also obsessive and susceptible, pursuing the dead impossibly out of the written record and into their hopes, regrets, dreams, and extravagant desires. It is these elements that give the book its extraordinary formal and ethical force.
Said the Dead by Doireann Ní Ghríofa is published by Faber (£18.99).
