Lennox Castle was built in the 1830s, and less than a century later, it opened as Glasgow corporation’s hospital for “mentally deficient” people. The hospital was the largest and best-equipped hospital in the Uk when it opened in 1936. However, by the 1980s, its standards had deteriorated to the extent that its residents were dangerously underweight and psychologically damaged.
In 1986, Alasdair Sim, the Lennox Castle Hospital’s medical director, said that he had “never worked in a worse pit.”
During the 1990s, the Scottish government decided to close this kind of large institutions. So, the health board actively developed a resettlement program to reintroduce the residents of Lennox Castle to society and supply them with homes of their own. Finally, the government shut down the notorious hospital in April 2002.
For more information: the British Medical Journal
