Ellen Foley, a patient at the West Riding Lunatic Asylum, Wakefield, Yorkshire. Photograph attributed to James Crichton-Browne, 1873.

A young woman, staring into a space away from the camera, identified as Ellen Foley, from Reform Street, Bradford. She was admitted to the West Riding Asylum in May 1861 as a twenty-two year old mill hand. Her earliest case note states that she was suffering from "mania characterised by her excited manners – talking and laughing and wandering about the ward breaking the windows". There would be no improvement in Ellen’s mental health and in 1873 her physician described her as being "almost completely demented". Her photograph was taken that same year. Ellen was transferred to the South Yorkshire Asylum, Wadsley near Sheffield in 1875 from where she was discharged four years later showing no improvement in her mental condition. Curiously, her case notes make no mention of acute melancholia, the annotation on her Wellcome Library photograph -- records in the West Yorkshire Archive Service, Wakefield, Yorkshire, identified by David Scrimgeour, op. cit.