The Mad-Doctor

In June 1857, Dr Alfred Yates Carr wrote to his wife and young sons back in England from the Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum, to which he had been committed three months before. Convinced of his own sanity and believing himself falsely imprisoned, he gave Louisa the latest news on his efforts to secure his freedom and return home. Before sealing the letter, he scribbled on the inside of the envelope “Keep up your spirits and do not despair, once out of this I do not think they will ever again succeed in getting me into an asylum. AYC”. Aside from a series of short escapes and releases, he would spend the rest of his life – 37 years – at Yarra Bend and Ararat lunatic asylums before he died, aged 73, in 1894. He never saw his family again. Carr appealed about his fate to members of the Victorian parliament and visiting doctors – who did not believe that he had a wife and children, thought that this was all part of his delusion. After all, he was clearly mad when he claimed that his mother had been murdered by his brother. Clearly mad when he claimed that the bouts of theft and violence that resulted in his committal were due to poisoning by Indian Hemp, which had been surreptitiously introduced into his tobacco by a longstanding foe. Clearly mad when he claimed to have been viciously beaten by asylum attendants, or kept in solitary confinement for three days without water. It was to provide for his family back in England, Carr said, that he put in a claim against the government for non-payment for his medical services in the aftermath of the Eureka rebellion. He had been the first doctor to reach the stockade after the guns had fallen silent and the cries of dying men were the only sounds carrying through the smoky air. Some thought it was treating the wounded here that had driven Carr mad, for what he found was a carnage of gunshot and bayonet wounds, horrible burns, one man still alive despite his brain being visible through his opened head. The government eventually paid up – but still not believing in the existence of Carr's family, chose to hold the money in trust for him rather than send it home. It wasn't Eureka that unhinged him though: the peculiar obsessions and delusions that assailed and finally overwhelmed Carr were in evidence years before. He had seen madness from both sides. In England he had been the resident physician at a small, private, rural lunatic asylum at Hunningham –a “mad-doctor”, in the parlance of the time. In the Antipodes, he found himself a patient, his mind turned upside down. At Hunningham he worked for the proprietor, James Harcourt, who sought to bring the patients back to health through 'moral treatment'. The asylums of the past had relied on mechanical restraints such as shackles and straitjackets to control or punish patients: the 'moral treatment', pioneered at the Quaker- run York Retreat around 1800, and popularised in the new government asylums by John Conolly, sought instead to treat patients not as wild beasts in need of taming, but as human beings, to be encouraged back down the road to sanity through the example of moral and rational behaviour. An article in the local paper just before Christmas 1848 described the excellent work being performed at Hunningham House and the number of cures effected there. “Every testimony we have heard of the mode of treatment pursued in the above asylum concurs in expressing the constant kindness and attention of the proprietor, Mr HARCOURT to the unfortunate inmates; as also to the skill and unwearying attention of the resident physician, Dr Alfred CARR, in ministering to that most deplorable of all afflictions, a mind diseased.” The encomium may have carried more weight had it not been written by Carr himself. All may have continued well had not Carr and the proprietor's wife Susannah detested one another. A series of petty disagreements blew up one chilly morning at the breakfast table. Carr joined the couple in the parlour and dragged his chair across the wooden boards directly between Susannah and the fire, blocking both warmth and light. Exasperated, she threw down her sewing and looked at her husband, who was moved to remark on Carr's "ungentlemanly" behaviour. Well, said Carr, Mrs H was certainly "no lady". She in turn called him a sneak, a mean, impertinent and insignificant fellow, and made some disparaging comment about his boots. Harcourt called him a liar, at which point Carr rose from the table and, as Mrs Harcourt fled the room, picked up his chair and threw it at his employer. With the aid of an attendant, Harcourt wrestled Carr to the ground, while Mrs H stood in the doorway encouraging her husband with cries of “That’s right, Harcourt, give the fellow some more, he richly deserves it”. Harcourt pressed assault charges. The magistrate, hearing both sides of the story, judged it to be an “unpleasant affair” that “does not amount to much”, and fined Carr one shilling plus costs. 3 Carr exacted his revenge by writing a long letter to the Commissioners in Lunacy and the Official Visitors of Lunatic Asylums in the County of Warwick outlining multiple cases of patient abuse at Hunningham, and calling down on Harcourt’s head an official inquiry. His claims rehearsed the full gothic repertoire of charges that were increasingly levelled at unregulated private asylums during the early nineteenth century. Neglect: dying patients left overnight without assistance. Abuse: patients left naked in unheated rooms as a form of punishment. Grotesquerie: a female attendant giving a patient a black eye whilst attempting to rub her nose in her own excrement. Violence: Harcourt striking patients with a dog whip and a stick. There was little evidence to support the charges, and the commissioners sensed that Carr's motives had "not been altogether actuated by a sense of duty", adding that he was himself "by no means free from the charge of improper treatment of Patients and in particular of subjecting them to repeated shower baths by way of punishment for slight inattention to his orders and acts of disrespect to himself”. Harcourt was almost completely exonerated, Carr humiliated. The Hunningham affair was later described as the first attack of Carr’s illness. Whilst on the face of it this was a story of clashing personalities, a brief flare of rage and violence and a vindictive and drawn out plan for revenge, there are elements of this shabby drama that were to recur throughout Carr’s life. He was always quick to kindle a sense of injustice, that the world had done hardly by him. Unable to weigh the true importance of matters and act accordingly, he turned his private grievances into public affairs, played out his internal conflicts through committees of inquiry, sought validation from others that he had truly been wronged. Devoting weeks of his life to seeking revenge against Harcourt shows the cracks in his personality that were ultimately to become wide enough for his sanity to disappear into. His appearances before a magistrate at his assault trial and at a public inquiry into asylum abuses were his first performances in a role he regularly reprised – the Witness. He took the stand a dozen times in the next 15 years, both as accuser and defendant. Hunningham was the first rehearsal for his final and most influential performance, as the cause celebre in a nine day libel trial in 1862 in which he testified to the abuses carried in a very different lunatic asylum – in Yarra Bend, Melbourne. Bowie vs Wilson is a nine day legal wonder, playing to a full house in the Supreme Court gallery, with almost verbatim transcripts of lawyer’s speeches and witness statements published in the newspapers, ultimately reprinted as a pamphlet running to 120 closely spaced pages. On trial, 4 apparently, is the seventy-four year old Superintendent of the Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum, Doctor Robert Bowie, and his management of the institution over the last decade. But Bowie is in fact the plaintiff, suing the editor of the Argus newspaper for libel following three articles the previous year. Yes, they were stinging, and made serious allegations: of patient abuse and neglect, indecency, mismanagement. The first began Events occur now and again painfully reminding us that in the picturesque bend of the Yarra, from which it takes its name, there still exists, with all its horrors, as far as the public knows, the lunatic asylum, and, with all his weakness and incompetency – to use the mildest terms we can call to mind – the manager Mr BOWIE For Bowie they are no doubt the last straw in a long running feud with the colony’s Chief Medical Officer William McCrae. For nearly ten years they have wrestled for control of the asylum, arguing over their widely differing views on its proper location and the treatment and condition of its patients, cultivating political support, testifying before parliamentary committees. Dr Bowie had taken charge of Yarra Bend during the gold rush. In his long career as a surgeon in London he had been described as an “indefatigable friend of the very poor”; assisting with the founding of benevolent asylums for the homeless, campaigning for improved sanitation, and working for the General Board of Health in tracking cholera cases and inspecting workhouses. His attention also turned to assisted emigration schemes, and in 1852 he sailed for Australia as ship’s surgeon on one of Caroline Chisholm’s emigrant vessels, the Athenian .

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