Madness in the Family: Insanity and Institutions in the Australasian Colonial World, 1860-1914 by Catharine S. Coleborne

Abstract

130 BOOK REVIEWS collective narrative such as this can help the reader to form an idea about the essence of what nursing meant to individual nurses and give meaning to the art and science of nursing work. Composing a story from random events is a difficult one. The author, however, has made a seemingly difficult task look extraordinarily simple. Patterns have emerged from the diaries and letters of World War I nurses that have provided an insight into what life was like in their work-world of caring. Nightingale’s message must have resonated with these women, as they provided conditions for healing despite the lack of material and human resources. Their courage, adaptability, resourcefulness, and dedication to caring for the maimed and dying is testimony to their selflessness and the basic principles of nursing. This book speaks to the futility of war in terms of unnecessary human suffering, and how nurses tried to contain the effects in a diligent professional manner and, as the author suggests, became vessels of containment. It will make an interesting read for all health professionals, especially those now employed in the theatre of war across the world. I especially recommend that student nurses read the book to gain a perspective on how the nurses in World War I created a strong foundation for today’s modern nurse. I also recommend teachers of nurses read these illuminating pages to remind themselves of the legacy that must be passed on in terms of caring for humanity and the virtues each one of us possesses. Finally, the author is to be commended on bringing to life the stories of nurses whose voices have been silenced by time. CAROL PIERCEY CURTIN UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY Catharine S. Coleborne, Madness in the Family: Insanity and Institutions in the Australasian Colonial World, 1860–1914 (London & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). ISBN 978-0-230-57807-4 (HC). 8 B&W illustrations, 4 tables, 2 maps, 256 pp. Catharine Coleborne’s new book addresses what have become two of the most fashionable issues in the contemporary historiography of psychiatry: relations between families, patients, and asylums; and psychiatry in colonial settings. Her work rests upon using materials Health & History ● 12/1 ● 2010 131 drawn from the records of four asylums: Gladsville Hospital for the InsaneinSydney;theYarraBendHospitalfortheInsaneinMelbourne; Goodna Hospital for the Insane, located between Brisbane and Ipswich in Queensland; and the mental hospital known informally as ‘the Whau’, serving Auckland on New Zealand’s North Island. This selection of institutions, though all located in Australasia, gives her research a broader and more ambitious comparative framework than most recent work in a similar vein. Most scholars exploring this terrain have contented themselves with looking at a single institution. In selecting her comparative cases, Coleborne has deliberately set out to try to uncover a ‘transcolonial’ world of psychiatry, rather than linking core and periphery, imperial or metropolitan asylums and their colonial outposts. Though she fusses a bit about using the notion of comparison, seeking instead to document commonalities in asylums and their populations in colonial, settler societies, any such claims, if they are to be well founded, must perforce engage in some systematic examination of evidence drawn from a variety of settings, and thus in comparing outcomes in somewhat varied settings. There is, moreover, a price to be paid for relegating Britain (and Europe more generally) to the periphery of her concerns. Australasia was an intellectual as well as a political colony, and the theoretical prejudices of its psychiatrists really do need to be placed in the context of the metropolitan profession. In one of her chapters, for example, Coleborne discusses fairly extensively the fear of the feeble minded and the emphasis on heredity and degeneration that dominated psychiatric theorising, and while she makes glancing reference to comparable ideas circulating in Britain and France, in my view she does not give sufficient weight and prominence to the fact that these notions were the ruling orthodoxy in European psychiatry during the entire period her book covers. A broader perspective on the rise of degenerationist and pessimistic views among psychiatrists and others world-wide, and on the eugenics movement, would have greatly enriched her otherwise interesting discussion of Australasian developments. Coleborne...