Barming asylum
Musical instruments were introduced while flowers and pictures decorated the previously dull dormitories.
Patients were now being quietened by medical staff who used chloroform and chemicals in the absence of leather straps and chains.
Despite banishing the bleak interior, unskilled and untrained nurses carried out care and were paid poorly and forced to work long hours.
Patients included homosexuals, epileptic and underage mothers who were housed alongside murderers and other criminals.
By 1895 patients could wear their own clothes and began to be cared for better with entertainment, more medical assistance and the introduction of activities such as basket making.
However, accounts show that a military manner remained and little sympathy was shown by staff amid locked doors, bath keys and boarded windows.
An extract from a History of Oakwood Hospital was also formerly called the West Kent Mental Hospital. Over the years, it was known as Barming Asylum, Barming Mental Hospital, and Barming Heath Lunatic Asylum.
A new site was identified and later approved for Maidstone’s hospital and services from the former Lunatic Asylum were transferred in the 1990s.
The former lamp-lit corridors of Barming’s Lunatic Asylum were knocked down to lay foundations for modern living.
St Andrew’s House, along with other Grade II listed buildings, was retained and turned into apartments.
Hundreds of flats replaced the derelict rooms and the cemetery, containing the remains of 7,000 former patients, was opened to the public in 2013.
Although the six-acre site is the final resting place for thousands there were few standing headstones. Oakwood Hospital says: “The result was that the more difficult patients had still to be controlled by the use of hypnotic drugs. The institution was no longer a prison, but it was not yet a hospital.
After 1912 vast improvements were made and training was provided for nurses and staff and the transition began to take shape.
On June 7, 1927, a nurses’ home and training school were officially opened by Princess Mary, completing the transformation from “prison to hospital”.