Appendix: Indications of Insanity Noted by Family and Friends of Inmate Prior to Committal Changed speech Peculiar and eccentric Religious delusions Answers in whispers Strange conduct, morose Boastful Strange in his head Foul language Suicidal Rambling in statements, incoherent Suspicious Singing Unable to give account of self Speaking quickly Unfounded fears Talkative, raving Vacant manner Talks nonsense Very queer Will not speak unless pressed Want of harmony Wild expressions of face Changed mental state Changed behaviour Anxious and depressed Dejected Abandonment or neglect of children/ Delusional family and/or household duties Depressed Aimless and despondent Depressed in spirits Cannot be trusted Excited Childishness Failing mentally Claims ill treatment Fits of temper Craving for drink Foolish Crying Forgetful, absent minded, bad memory Dancing Great state of tension Destructive Hallucinations of sight and hearing Dirty in habits Inside is dead to all feeling* Does not behave like a sensible per- Irrational son Listless Eating like an animal Low spirited Erratic conduct, strange, irregular Melancholic manner Mind unhinged Exalted opinions of self Miserable Fumbling 154 Indications of Insanity 155 Goes naked, indecent manner Singing hymns Has become negligent of self Tears hair Holding hands in front of face Tendency to continual sleeping Lustful/raving about sexual functions Uncontrollable Masturbation Unexplained laughter No appetite Unnatural Noisy Violent and dangerous with threats Not working to others Refusing food Wandering Restless in manner Wears a man’s hat (a woman) Self-abuse Wrings hands Note: *This statement was made by the patient. Some of these are direct quotations but behaviours may apply more widely; much of this language used was used by lay observers or ‘translated’ by doctors. Source: These observations were all made by the family or friends of patients at the time of committal, and taken from the case notes and case papers of Gladesville Hospital for the Insane, Goodna Hospital for the Insane, the Yarra Bend Hospital for the Insane and Auckland Mental Hospital, c. 1860s–1910. Notes Introduction 1. State Records New South Wales (SRNSW), Gladesville Hospital, CGS 5034, Letters concerning patients, 4/8207, Letter 110. 2. SRNSW, CGS 5031, 1857–1925, Medical casebooks, Folio 56. This patient was named Marion but known as ‘Lissie’ in her father’s letter. 3. I am using the term ‘family’ to describe the broad array of relationships and associations asylum inmates had with blood relatives. It is primarily a European derived definition. 4. This work is also inspired by the research agendas established by scholars including Roy Porter, Charles Rosenberg and Nancy Tomes. See for instance Roy Porter, ‘The Patient’s View: Doing Medical History from Below’, Theory and Society 14 (1985), pp. 175–98; Charles E. Rosenberg, ‘Framing Disease: Illness, Society and History’, in Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History, edited by Rosenberg and Janet Golden (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992); Nancy Tomes, A Generous Confidence: Thomas Story Kirkbride and the Art of Asylum-Keeping, 1840–1883 (Cambridge UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 5. Nancy Tomes, ‘The Anglo-American Asylum in Historical Perspective’, in Location and Stigma: Contemporary Perspectives on Mental health and Mental Health Care, edited by Christopher Smith and John A. Giggs (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988), pp. 14; 19. In revising her earlier work for a paperback edi- tion, Tomes comments that she was ‘forcibly struck’ by the roles of fam- ilies; see Nancy Tomes, The Art of Asylum Keeping: Thomas Story Kirkbride and the Origins of American Psychiatry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), p. xix. 6. Mark Finnane, ‘Asylums, Families, and the State’, History Workshop 20 (1985), p. 135. 7. David Wright, ‘Getting out of the Asylum: Understanding the Confinement of the Insane in the Nineteenth Century’, Social History of Medicine 10:1 (1997), pp. 137–55. 8. Finnane, ‘Asylums, Families, and the State’, p. 143. 9. Stephen Garton, Medicine and Madness: A Social History of Insanity in New South Wales, 1880–1940 (Kensington: UNSW Press, 1988), p. 189. 10. See Mary-Ellen Kelm, ‘Women, Families and the Provincial Hospital for the Insane, British Columbia, 1905–1915’, Journal of Family History 19: 2 (1994), pp. 177–93; Patricia Prestwich, ‘Female Alcoholism in Paris, 1870–1920: The Response of Psychiatrists and of Families’, History of Psychiatry 14: 3 (2003), pp. 321–36; and Marjorie Levine-Clark, ‘Dysfunctional Domesticity: Female Insanity and Family Relationships among the West Riding Poor in the Mid- Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Family History 25: 3 (2000), pp. 341–61. 11. Ellen Dwyer, Homes for the Mad: Life inside Two Nineteenth-Century Asylums (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1987), p. 87; Cheryl 156 Notes 157 Krasnick Warsh, Moments of Unreason: The Practice of Canadian Psychiatry and the Homewood Retreat, 1883–1923 (Montreal and Kingston, London and Buffalo: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989), p. 91. 12. Akihito Suzuki, ‘Framing Psychiatric Subjectivity: Doctor, Patient and Record- Keeping at Bethlem in the Nineteenth Century’, in Insanity, Institutions and Society: A Social History of Madness in Comparative Perspective, edited by Joseph Melling and Bill Forsythe (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 115–36. 13. James Moran, ‘The Signal and the Noise: The Historical Epidemiology of Insanity in Ant-Bellum New Jersey’, History of Psychiatry 14: 3 (2003), pp. 281–301; David Wright, ‘Delusions of Gender? Lay Identification and Clinical Diagnosis of Insanity in Victorian England’, in Sex and Seclusion, Class and Custody: Perspectives on Gender and Class in the History of British and Irish Psychiatry (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, Clio Medica 73, 2004), pp. 149–76. 14. Akihito Suzuki, Madness at Home: The Psychiatrist, The Patient, and the Family in England, 1820–1860 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2006), p. 24. 15. Suzuki, Madness at Home, p. 150. 16. Hilary Marland, Dangerous Motherhood: Insanity and Childbirth in Victorian Britain (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 17. All of these institutions were called ‘asylums’ before 1914, but name changes occurred at different points over the period of this study; therefore the proper names used here alternate between ‘asylum’ and ‘hospital for the insane’. 18. Frederick Norton Manning, Address Delivered on Resigning Charge as Medical Superintendent of the Hospitals for the Insane at Gladesville and Callan Park (Sydney: Government Printer, 1879). D. I. MacDonald papers, National Library of Australia, Manuscripts Collection, MS 5147. 19. Finnane, ‘Asylums, Families and the State’, pp. 145–6. Tomes argues that in the United States, the distinctions between private and public asylums were more blurred than in Britain at the same time; see ‘The Anglo-American Asylum’, p. 9. 20. For a brief comment on Australian private institutions, see Garton, Medicine and Madness, p. 109. On private institutions in New Zealand, see Alan Somerville, ‘Ashburn Hall, 1882–1904’, in ‘Unfortunate Folk’: Essays on Mental Health Treatment 1863–1882, edited by Barbara Brookes and Jane Thomson (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2001), pp. 83–103. On pri- vate institutions in Britain, see Charlotte MacKenzie, Psychiatry for the Rich: A History of Ticehurst Private Asylum, 1792–1917 (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). 21. Finnane, ‘Asylums, Families and the State’, p. 145. Melling and Forsythe argue that English asylums also took a broader cross-section of society than previously supposed; see Joseph Melling and Bill Forsythe, The Politics of Madness: The State, Insanity and Society in England, 1845–1914 (Routledge: London and New York, 2006), p. 173. On Callan Park, see Garton, Medicine and Madness, p. 109; and on Kew, see a report in the Australasian Medical Gazette, October 1892, p. 394. 158 Notes 22. Tomes, ‘The Anglo-American Asylum’, p. 12. 23. For Australian welfare histories focused on the nineteenth century, see Brian Dickey, No Charity There: A Short History of Social Welfare in Australia (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987); Stephen Garton, ‘Rights and Duties: Arguing Charity and Welfare 1880–1920’, in Welfare and Social Policy in Australia: The Distribution of Social Advantage, edited by Michael Wearing and Rosemary Bereen (Sydney and London: Harcourt Brace, 1994), pp. 23–38. For New Zealand, see Margaret Tennant, Paupers and Providers: Charitable Aid in New Zealand (Wellington: Allen & Unwin and Historical Branch, 1990); David Thomson, A World Without Welfare: New Zealand’s Colonial Experiment (Auckland: Auckland University Press with Bridget Williams Books, 1998). 24. International histories of the family include Leonore Davidoff, Megan Doolittle, Janet Fink and Katherine Holden, The Family Story: Blood, Contract and Intimacy, 1830–1960 (London and New York: Longman, 1999). For dis- cussion of the nature of the colonial family, see Michael Gilding, The Making and Breaking of the Australian Family (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991) and Families in Colonial Australia, edited by Patricia Grimshaw, Chris McConville and Ellen McEwen (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1985); for specific comment about family economies in Australia, see Shirley Fisher, ‘The Family and the Sydney Economy in the Late Nineteenth Century’, in Families in Colonial Australia, pp. 153–62. On the changing relationship