So, part of my job is to see what people are making of the history of our Hospital. Bethlem partly exists in the gothic, horror-adjacent end of history, and so attracts a certain kind of presentation. Restraints, gore, electrodes, I thought I'd seen it all. Until... ...I stumbled onto this book.

I found this on Amazon, while looking for a medium- sized history of Bethlem. There's one very good history (Andrews et al), which is a chonky 650 pages, and a couple of flawed-but-have-some-upside popular histories. I can never remember their name, so have to search every time.

And this came up as second on the list. I'd never heard of it. That's fine. The Museum and Archives didn't ever meet half the authors of the other histories either. You can do a lot from home these days, and our records are on Find My Past. The image grated a bit. It's not any version of Bethlem..

And the statues that were on the gateposts still survive. They're in the Museum! And they look nothing like this. Anyway, no judgement on the history just for that. And that's when I got to the sample...

So what's happened here? That's when I started looking a bit more closely at the author...

Evelyn Cross has written a number of history books, all about institutional scandals. Here's a sample of some of her Amazon list...

Now, the Bethlem book is bland. But her work on Willowbank is utterly anonymous. She could be talking about any institution here...

Even weirder, the publication dates in Amazon have listed all her books as appearing in a matter of the last couple of months. I guess that could be self publishing playing some odd tricks? But it looks like some sort of AI generated material. Mostly about horrific institutional abuses.

These books appear to only exist on Amazon. They don't come up on a Google search. This 'Evelyn Cross' has no trace other than these Amazon listings. There is a self-publishing Evelyn Cross (who posts carefully bland engagement stuff on X), but she doesn't lay claim to these books.

(her books seem to be fantasy/romance too)

So... Yeah. Be careful out there folks. History writing just got a whole lot weirder, and finding good written history suddenly looks a whole lot harder.

(apologies, didn't use alt text on some passages, which are large chunks of text but they are available as samples via Amazon)

Just to quickly return to this, the implications of this are 1) by relying on out of copyright history, the errors of past historians get regurgitated (badly) 2) 'mid-tier', affordable histories by humans (yer Katherine Arnolds etc), which are at least fact checked, get squeezed out of the market