L'asile des trois comtés

A Place in the Country. Three Counties Asylum 1860-1999

Judith Pettigrew, Rory W. Reynolds & Sandra Rouse

University of Hertfordshire Press

Format: Paperback, 136pp 

Published: Sep 2017

ISBN: 978-1-909291-50-8 

In the mid-1850s, the counties of Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire and Huntingdonshire set about looking for a site for a new asylum to house their 'pauper lunatics'. Two hundred acres of farmland at Stotfold on the Hertfordshire—Bedfordshire border were purchased and in March 1860 the first patients were admitted to the new Three Counties Asylum (TCA).

The asylum was in operation for almost a century and a half and, as approaches to treating mental illness changed, so did TCA. When it first opened, in the wake of the 1845 Lunacy Act, it was with the intention of providing humane treatment to replace the harsh regimes in private madhouses, prisons and workhouses.

In time, drugs and other therapies were developed that were sometimes successful in alleviating symptoms. Finally, as the era of institutional care ended, Fairfield Hospital, as it came to be known, closed its doors in 1999.