Exhibiting 'Madness': Material Culture and the Asylum

Abstract

lic watching of the mad had been censured but was replaced by a different kind of surveillance. This sometimes involved the post-mortem, as Mr Ford's most unusual collection detailed in the epigraph to this article reveals. At other times it involved policing; or observation, as in the case of Victorian journalism, which painted a picture of the asylum as a closed world that was yet on display and under public scrutiny. And members of the public also entertained the notion that watching the lunatics was a kind of sport: in nineteenth-century Victoria, with police employed at the Yarra Bend Asylum to prevent disturbances from visitors on public holidays.3 Important within the context of the production of knowledge about colonial medicine, and the 'otherness' of the mad in the nineteenth century, is an aspect of colonial Victoria's social history rarely explored the colonialist medical collecting and exhibiting of asylum super