Concerts and cures in nineteenth-century Scotland

Image card contains the title text and the front page of a magazine, The New Moon, the Crichton Royal Institution Literary Register, followed by a full page of musical notation in the form of a song, Henri & Mariane.

Rosemary Golding has published an article investigating the links between music, health and wellbeing at a mid-nineteenth-century Scottish asylum.

Golding’s research has shown that the Crichton Royal Institution made extensive use of music, including concerts by patients, staff and visiting performers, as well as classes in singing, choirs and a band. The article demonstrates that music was used not only to entertain patients, but to give structure, as a reward, to facilitate social events, and to offer patients opportunities for agency and creativity. Scottish music was prominent, with several published anecdotes suggesting that music associated with childhood or national identity had a particularly curative effect.

This research forms part of ongoing work on the intersections between music and the arts, health, wellbeing, and psychiatry, in the nineteenth century.