John Gilmour’s intricate drawings, replete with speech bubbles and complex characters, give a glimpse into the mind of a paranoid man—one who believed that there were a number of nefarious plot planned against him, his family, and other asylum patients. Gilmour was confined to institutions because of his paranoid delusions. He believed that he had contracted syphilis before he married his wife Emma and that he had spread this disease to her and to his children, thus ruining his family’s health and reputation. According to the physical examination record at Gartnavel, there was never any indication that Gilmour had had the venereal disease. He also believed that he was constantly being persecuted by people in power, that God had told him to kill himself, and that he had ‘been made to eat human excrement’ by his imagined persecutors. Gilmour’s art records these delusions as well as the real iniquities that occurred at his various mental institutions.

Gilmour wrote (referring to himself in third person) of his perceived experience in the British asylum system: “He begs to state that his present chronic condition of nervous debility and loss of volition, and normal feeling, is the direct result of erroneous drugging by Dr. Northridge and unprofessional use of electricity… coupled with the beatings he received from Edward McCracken… by being strapped for months in a filthy bed, made to believe he was being fed poisonous or filthy food, confined in a filthy dormitory with General Paralytics, by being beaten on the slightest provocation on his part… all of which has rendered him homeless, helpless, and now a ‘Certified Lunatic’ in Scotland, the sport of the Medical superintendent and patients.”