During the 1970s and 1980s, psychiatric histories tended to stress the key roles played by the state and the medical profession in the growth of nineteenth-century lunatic asylums. But, in recent years, attention has turned increasingly to the involvement of families in the committal process. Catharine Coleborne draws on a vast literature dealing with asylums, medicine, families, emotions, colonialism and race in order to examine the relationships between families and four Australasian asylums during the period 1860–1914. The asylums were located in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Auckland. Coleborne aims, among other things, to see what the records of these institutions have to tell us about the nature of families in white-settler British colonies. The book examines ‘colonial psychiatry’ and its influence in constructing a ‘white’ identity (p. 42). It shows how psychiatry, with its growing emphasis on the hereditary nature of mental illness, began to focus on the family and was concerned especially by settlers who lacked colonial families. However, at the ‘centre of this book’, according to Coleborne, is an analysis of the ways in which ‘lay descriptions’ of insanity were used by doctors, both before and during committal (p. 147). Thus, chapters investigate family inputs into case records, correspondence between families and asylums, disputes over maintenance payments, and schemes whereby families could take back patients on temporary release. The concluding chapter devotes space to critiquing asylum archives and ends on a rather equivocal note. It states confidently that ‘families were in fact present at committal, discharge, and during patients’ stays in the institution’, but argues that examining asylum sources with the ‘theoretical tools to discover patient and family “agency”… may not by itself be enough to reshape either histories of the colonial family, or histories of insanity’ (p. 152). This, of course, begs the question: what is required to ‘reshape’ such histories? While well written, the book is quite repetitive. As well as the basic contents of the six main chapters being rehearsed in both the introduction and conclusion, each individual chapter has an introduction and conclusion setting out its main arguments. Thus, most key points are discussed at least four times. A looser, more flexible structure would have made for a pleasanter read. There are also rather a lot of factual, spelling and printing errors, plus some problems with the maps and statistics. For example, Yarra Bend Asylum in Melbourne is said to have opened in the 1850s – in fact it opened in 1848. It was then in the Port Phillip District – not ‘Philip’ (p. 23). In the first map, Australian towns are misplaced and their names misspelled. New South Wales is described as the ‘hub’ of Australasian ‘intellectual exchanges’ about insanity. The map displaying this ‘hub’ has a series of arrows apparently illustrating the directions of these exchanges, yet Melbourne and Brisbane are shown influencing Sydney, not vice versa (p. 26). As for the statistical tables, they all relate to ‘c.1905’ (pp. 37 and 136). This is very late in the period under study: some matching statistics from the 1860s would have been informative. In addition, the bibliography contains a significant number of misprints (pp. 199, 203, 206–13). These blemishes aside, this book accomplishes a great deal in tracing the complex relationships that existed between families and asylums in the Antipodes. Yet Coleborne is right to call for more research. Her book demonstrates that much remains to be done before we can thoroughly understand the family–asylum relationship and what exactly it meant for patients.
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Nov 1, 2011
John Smyth + 2
Open Access