Featured on PDR in the collection On the Writing of the Insane (1870)

G. Mackenzie Bacon (1835–1883) — alienist and superintendent of the Cambridgeshire asylum that would become Fulbourn Hospital — set out, in 1870, “to place before the reader a series of pictures of insane minds, painted by themselves”. While the gestures and speech patterns of the mentally ill had been commented on in the nineteenth century, Bacon believed that a lack of attention had been paid to their writing. To carry out his research, he resorts to a kind of layman’s analysis of semantics and graphology. Describing one sample of a man’s handwriting reproduced in the book, Bacon notes that its “incoherency of idea, broken purpose, and want of consequence in the words, is shown in the odd scrawl and fantastic figures. It gives a better…