Talk:Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum

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[edit] Reminder

Reminder to self: Look up The Times 28th Jan 1903, regarding the loss of much life to a large and terrible fire.--Aspro 15:54, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Proposed correction to article title.

The adjective 'Lunatic' was never used as an attribution to the noun 'asylum' (except perhaps by hacks in the tabloids) when the place name came before it (the asylum is the possessor of the lunatics). This institution certainly never had that title and so I say it is not encyclopaedic to use a vernacular term as the articles title. Any comments as to whether it should just be: Colney Hatch Asylum ?--Aspro 17:37, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

Google Books has 206 hits on "Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum" and 252 hits on "Colney Hatch Asylum". That includes both new and old books. Looking at just older books (pre-1923), there are 115 for "Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum" and 78 for "Colney Hatch Asylum". I'm not sure what all this means, other than people seem to refer to it either way in print, both historically (including professional medical books) and in more recent times. I would say since the Institution was never officially called "Lunatic" (are we sure about that?) that we drop it from the title, but include it as one of the alternative names in the lead section. -- Stbalbach 18:39, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for that Stbalbach. It prompted me to search out a few original documents facsimiles and it seems that even the visiting justices of the peace didn't particularly mind how it was referred to either. As it was their asylums -then that's good enough for me. Maybe I was just being too pedantic, so I'll leave it be. --Aspro 21:06, 27 January 2007 (UTC)