From Nadine McInnis's Two Hemispheres, published by Brick Books in 2007.

Ten women, long dead, photographedin the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum.You could be fooledby their modest dress, Victorian poses, thegrey sheet behind themobscuring how they arrived here.Their doctor crouches behind the camera hidden beneath a velvet cloak. He has placed them on chairs, smoothed their hair, asked them to hold still—a docility today attained only by pharmaceuticals.You would never know from the faded salt-on-paper portraits that this asylum was considered modern and humane: a perfect self-contained world with its own gasworks, water tower, laundry and gardens tended by patients rescued from indigence.Even knowing this, you still wantto turn away and forget them,the way you focuson a red traffic light when the homelesstroll for change between lanes,or cross streets, darting between cars,when twitching men lurch towards you.Let them be faint rings of disturbancetrapped in glass. But for you, they become negatives, darkly transparent.Move in more closely,press your faceagainst the museum case, and you’ll seethat one is pretty, her dark hairfalling into her lap like water.Another does not raise her eyes.One grips arms across her chest, defiant.Her truth cannot be heldby this image; across 150 yearsthe betrayal in her gaze burns.Their faces have outlastedthe science of physiognomythat created them, studies in objectivity,gradations on a scale used to rank suffering:distress, sorrow, deep sorrow, griefandmelancholy, anguish and despair—a perfect and faithful record.And, you wonder, how is one sorrowdeeper than another?What is melancholy if not grief?Although the old-fashioned word anguishfeels right to you, timeless, lived timelessly.That’s the problem, the never-endingsense of it, just like these womenwho will sit foreverunknown.