Re-Issuing the Historic New Moon Newspaper for the 2024 Lunar Symposium
To celebrate the 2024 Lunar Symposium being held at The Crichton, we have re-issued a digital version of The New Moon newspaper.
The inaugural issue of Crichton’s very own in-house magazine The New Moon or Crichton Royal Literary Register was published in December 1844, being the ‘unaided work’, according to W.A.F. Browne, of five patients. While the literary arts of reading and writing were endorsed by other asylum medical superintendents across the nineteenth century, Scottish asylums, including the C.R.I, were the amongst the first in Britain to produce their own periodicals.
The New Moon was filled with an extraordinary array of literary compositions contributed from within and beyond the institution. In its pages were found poetry, short stories and essays, humorous anecdotes, weather reports, records of donations to the asylum library and museum, letters to the editor, and even contributions from patients residing in other asylums. As the diversity of the magazine’s content highlights, The New Moon was not just a literary journal: it also chronicled day-to-day life at the Crichton Royal Institution
We wanted to resource some articles from original editions of The New Moon and add to those contributions from the current Crichton community. it is important that is shows the creative heritage that is alive on the Crichton and is connected to our heritage.
You can read the latest issue of The New Moon here: The New Moon: June 2024
The Crichton Institution was founded in 1838 by Elizabeth Crichton (née Grierson), honouring her late husband Dr James Crichton. The first patient was admitted in 1839 and royal status awarded in 1840. In 1849, on the same site, the Southern Counties Asylum (SCA) was established for paupers; it merged with Crichton Royal (CRI) in 1884.
Dr W.A.F. Browne, first Physician Superintendent (1838 – 57) pioneered patient-centred care, outdoor activities and creative therapy – at least for private patients. Browne was Scotland’s first Commissioner in Lunacy; his son, Dr James Crichton-Browne, played a crucial role in developing modern psychiatry.
Browne’s compassionate approach was continued by his successors. Patients contributed to dances and soirees from 1840 onwards, staging and enjoying music and pantomimes. As well as The New Moon, they wrote and printed poetry, attended and delivered lectures. They accessed books through the Asylum Library. There is evidence of patient to patient teaching too, and of female patients teaching staff children.
CRI was self-sufficient in food, flowers, laundry and work. In the twentieth century there was a seaside holiday home for patients, thanks to staff fundraising. Staff children, many attending Brownhall School, used the therapeutic swimming pool and watched movies together. This was a sociable space with a curling pond, football and cricket team; people walked beautiful grounds, painted and engaged in creative therapy.
For all these reasons CRI was known on site as “The Village”. Less positively, it was referred to locally as “Up the Middle Road’. John McQueen, a former patient, remembered:
You could go up the top way: Easterbrook Hall. Or down the bottom, to the Solway, where the main gate is. It was, “Oh, you’re going the middle road?” You’d go up there, but you’d be half daft, quite mad; there’s still people like that about it. When I went ‘Up the Middle Road’ it was terrible – not for me – but: “everybody will talk about me, how bad it was.”
McQueen’s stay was short, and helpful; others remember dark times here. In honouring CRI’s heritage, the Trust aims to record the full range of memories, dispelling the stigma around mental ill health, through continuing creative engagements.
