The Navarre hospital in Évreux opens the doors of its museum on the history of European psychiatry

2023-10-23 10:01:09

Because “mental health is a right and committing to it is investing in a better life and future for all”, the new hospital in Navarre participates every year in the Mental Health Information Weeks (SISM ) in partnership with Unafam Eure and with the support of the Local Mental Health Council of Évreux Portes de Normandie. The 34th edition runs until Wednesday October 18 on the theme “At all ages of life, my mental health is a right” in order to change the way we look at sick people and practices. The program made it possible to discover the museum space of the psychiatric establishment during visits which allow you to delve into the twists and turns of a little-known or even unknown world of psychiatry.

Guided on site by former nurses

Opened on August 1, 2016, in the basement of the Chapel, the museum space is the initiative of former director Jean-Luc Killian, “attached to old stones”. “During each modernization, when a department was emptied, he collected the equipment to put it in a storage unit. Knowing our passion for the hospital, one day he summoned us to organize the 150th anniversary of the opening of the asylum. He wanted something lasting. He gave us this location and had over 350 packages delivered to us. It took months to trace the origins of the instruments, furniture and objects, sort them and first arrange a single room. Today, around 800 people per year come to visit this small museum by appointment or during the European Heritage and Matrimoine Days and SISM”, say Alain Deprez, Philippe Massot and Jacques Vassault, the founding guides, ex- nurses.

“Palace History for Madmen”

For more than two hours, the trio first goes back to 1838, when “Louis-Philippe published a law which imposed an asylum in each department, because previously, the mad were in the wild, in prison or in hospices. There was no place to watch over the insane. This law will also define the terms of internments.” Designed by the Ebroïc architect Symphorien Bourguignon, “with high quality materials and innovations such as the leap-through which allows patients to see the outside despite the surrounding walls”, the project will last four years on 17 ha plus 47 ha of fields and forest in order to “live in self-sufficiency”. Entrusted to nuns, the asylum opened in August 1866 and had more than 1,000 patients in 1903. The establishment was quickly hit by epidemics of cholera and diphtheria. The victims will then be buried in “the field of rest”.

1954, the end of straitjackets

As its function was to keep the restless and not to treat them, the four rooms of the museum offer the possibility of progressing through the different professions necessary to live between the four walls (baking, carpentry, lingerie, breeding, agriculture, etc. ), to discover the twenty vats of 6,000 liters of light cider, “the official drink, because drinking water was rare”, the reconstruction of a cell with restraint belts and straitjackets, “the last of which were ordered in 1954, because the first drugs arrived”, and ending up in the treatment room with a collection of surgical tools and devices to treat, for example, schizophrenia. A site far from “Above the Cuckoo’s Nest”.