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Asylums

Teachers and lunatics

It seems that Joshua Summerhill (1834-1905) and his wife Elizabeth Tonks (1831-1903) had 6 children, 5 of whom survived to adulthood. Three of the four surviving girls became teachers, and three of them seem to have had mental health issues at some point in their lives. Only one of the girls married, at the age of 58, to a fellow teacher who had been widowed 4 years previously. She died at the age of 73 in Coton Hill Hospital, which at the time was an asylum for the mentally ill from the upper and middle classes.

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