Said the Dead is a book that was born in the archive. It grew from hundreds of hours spent studying a series of casebooks that had been rescued from the cellars of a derelict hospital nearby. By the time I happened to find these books in the archive, they were over a century old and incredibly fragile, their pages brittle and crumbling – but inside, another world was alive.
I began with casebooks from the 1890s and slowly read my way towards the 1920s. Many of the books were printed with the name of the institution, ‘Cork District Lunatic Asylum’, a title I could never get used to, always flinching at the word ‘lunatic’, so abrasive to the modern ear. Turning those pages, I found myself flinching again and again at the doctors’ words.
‘Patient is dull and stupid, works badly at sewing’.
‘An epileptic idiot who eats papers’.
‘A feebleminded, silly little woman’.
Occasionally, however, I was astonished to find transcriptions of patients’ speech. Their voices spoke so clearly from the page.
‘Says she is queen of the world.’
‘…in answer to every question, says ‘that is my business, I didn’t come here to answer to you, I didn’t come here to work.’
‘When her mother comes to see her, she says, ‘Woman, you are not my mother.’’
I longed to hear more from these voices, their difficulties and sorrows, their joys and desires – their lives. So, I did the only thing I could. I read. I read and read, and as I read, I felt their whole, vivid world come to life in my mind. And then I began to write.
