Madness Locked Away: the Insane Asylum Museum of San Servolo

The Museum’s purpose, implicit in the permanent exhibition title Madness Locked Away, is to highlight the marginalising and segregating aspect of the mental hospital through specific exhibits, descriptions and explanatory panels 

Through the history of the San Servolo Asylum, the oldest and largest in the Veneto region, the exhibition tells the condition of locked up patients and psychiatry's approach to mental illness during the 19th and 20th centuries

A place to discover and learn about the bond that has united, even if in pain, the community to this part of its territory

The testimonies on display are items, documents,  instruments, medical records, images and photographs 

The nineteenth century in Veneto was characterized by a serious impoverishment of the countryside. Food was scarce and insufficient. Alcoholism and pellagra spread endemically. The latter, in particular, was the main cause of hospitalization in San Servolo Asylum  

In the Asylum food was the main therapy to cure pellagra. Occupational therapy was also practiced, as with work the spirit is distracted by delusional ideas and the body is tired so as to feel the need for a restful sleep

Hydrotherapy used baths and showers. For acute mania, prolonged hot baths were associated with affusions of cold water or irrigations of water (between 10 and 15 degrees) on the skull of the specially shaved patients

The instruments left in the Laboratory and in the Out-patient ward allow us to understand that the Mental Hospital was also a place where scientific research was carried out in the neuropathological field

For acute cases, containment was practiced. It was believed (or made people to believe) that the typical containment tools - handcuffs, shackles, sleeves - played an educational role ...

The last decades of the nineteenth century are characterized by the strong influence of Cesare Lombroso's school in the psychiatric field

The thickness compass was used to measure skull and chest deformities for anthropometric evaluation

In 1904 italian psychiatry was reorganized with a new law, in which also the rules of guardianship of the sheltered mentally sick patients were given

The last decades of the Mental Hospital are characterized by organicism, pharmacological approach and use of convulsant therapies, like insulin shock (1932) and ETC (1838)

Some brave psychiatrists, starting from the Sixties, tried to go upstream by practicing forms of group psychotherapy in the Hospital. Prolific cues for Franco Basaglia's revolution which led to the enactment of Law 180 and to the closure of psychiatric hospitals

Completing the museum display is a reconstruction of the anatomical room with a collection of skulls and brains, all pathological, preserved using the plastination method

The original anatomical table and instruments date from the late 19th century, as do the jars used to preserve human brains in special solutions  

 The Museum’s scientific aspects were curated by professors Diego Fontanari and Mario Galzigna, while the exhibition was set up by architect Barbara Accordi