Ticehurst House, a private asylum, flourished during the nineteenth century as the most expensive of such establishments, being owned and run by the Drs Newington over five successive generations. The discovery of the full set of patient casebooks begun in 1845-6 made it possible to review in detail the clinical features of a complete cohort of patients admitted to the asylum between 1845 and 1890. Six-hundred-and-one patients were thus analysed in terms of their age, sex, length of stay, symptoms, treatment and outcome. Modern operational diagnoses were used, and 80% of the cohort were found to conform to Research Diagnostic Criteria, in particular to the categories for schizophrenia and manic-depressive disorder. An additional finding was the high prevalence of movement and postural disorder among the schizophrenic group, as well as a significant trend towards the selection of a treatable, good-outcome group of patients with manic-depressive illness. These results are discussed by comparison with other modern studies of the asylum period, and in the contemporary context of Victorian psychological medicine. It is suggested that the violence, physicality and chronicity of psychotic illness must be seen as central to the debate about the rise of the asylum in nineteenth-century Britain. Furthermore, the similarity in core symptoms found in such patients and those seen in the 1980s indicates that the categories 'schizophrenia' and 'manic-depressive disorder' have a robust validity that is not confined to the social parameters of a particular time period.