Joshua Shaw

Joshua Shaw is the chief doctor of the York Lunatic Asylum. He features in The Lunatic, The Doctors, and The Daemonologist.

He replaced Dr. Best as the chief alienist, and has been working to improve conditions within the asylum and increasing the transparency of its operations, with some success. The work is difficult, though, and many of his aquaintances have been worried about his sanity of late.

He would do anything to pull the asylum through its next inspection.

He has been overseeing the trial of a novel substance, provided to him by William Allesbury, on his patients at York Asylum, and has found it to be moderately sucessful in controling mental illnesses, but to cause a vast range of worrying side effects. These effects caused him to cease the trial sooner than planned.

Dr Shaw died in York aged 96, in 1871. He left a sample of the drug he briefly tested to his cousin Adrianna Everson, With the following instructions:

"To my cousin Adrianna Everson, I bequeath also the small blue vial which can be found in the locked cabinet beside my bed, along with its contents. This vial is to be kept safe, and the contents not handled by any person, for at least fifty years, and until such progress in the sciences of the mind has been made, that some alienist or pharmacist might, by some novel and ingenious instrument, divine the nature of its workings."