My laptop banged against my thigh as I wove through crowds at Waterloo station in London. It was my first time back in England since finishing my doctorate five years before and I’d forgotten how many people crammed the city. I boarded the train and slid into a window seat with relief. I’d returned because of a footnote relating to Maud Praed, the daughter of nineteenth-century Australian novelist Rosa Praed. Rosa’s biographer had attempted to find Maud’s medical records by writing to the sanatorium in which Maud was placed in 1902, but she was told that patient records were destroyed after twenty-five years. After checking the database for the National Archives (which didn’t exist when the biographer wrote her book), I found that patient records for Holloway Sanatorium still existed.