People with intellectual disability at the Grahamstown Lunatic Asylum: humanizing photographs, stories and narratives from the casebooks, 1890–1920

Abstract

In the medical literature of South Africa in the early twentieth century, Dr Thomas Duncan Greenlees published a dehumanized portrayal of people with intellectual disability (PWID) who were institutionalized at the Grahamstown Lunatic Asylum. To restore the humanity of the institutionalized patients, the asylum’s casebooks provide a valuable resource. To this end, the article investigates the casebook entries and photographs to explore the humanity of PWID. The investigation of the casebooks follows Ariella Azoulay’s call for us to engage with, and retrieve, the stories of the photographed PWID that tell of times before and after their admittal to the asylum, of multiple spaces in and beyond the asylum, and by including the various roles and positions that they performed in the asylum’s body politic. These stories are enriched by adopting a disability mode of analysis.