Catharine Coleborne, Madness in the Family: Insanity and Institutions in the Australasian Colonial World, 1860-1914, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2010. Pp. xv + 220. pound80. ISBN 978 0 230 57807 4.

摘要

An Australian historian, Catharine Coleborne, has produced a fine social history of madness in Victorian and Edwardian Australia and New Zealand, Her book is based on the subtle analysis of 215 patients from four psychiatric hospitals in Australasia: Gladesville Hospital (Sydney), the Yarra Bend Hospital (Melbourne), Goodna Hospital (Queensland) and the Whau or Auckland Mental Hospital (New Zealand). Coleborne's work examines a type of 'colonial psychiatry' and she has drawn upon now extensive historical works on the social history of psychiatry of other settler colonies such as Canada and South Africa. Since the patients she discusses were overwhelmingly white (with some interesting exceptions), the post-colonial themes of race and power are not prominent in her analysis. Instead, we are presented with a series of sensitive analyses of a fabric of understanding and caring for the insane, stretching over the vast colonies of Australasia, or what the author calls 'the transcolonial world of psychiatry' (p. 8). This fabric of understanding was not just composed of psychiatric institutions and doctors working there: families of the patients were more important nodes of the network which formulated the experience of being insane. Unlike highly visible institutions which had their bricks and mortar, public status, annual publications (and kangaroo-hopping gardens), the networks of families and patients were diffuse and hard to notice at first sight, but nonetheless were real in their power to mould the societal structure to find, recognise, and deal with insanity. Due to the demographic and socio-economic factors unique to Australasian immigrants' society, the fabric had its characteristic forms. This work is an attempt to grasp the nature of the fabric from careful and methodologically innovative readings of psychiatric archives.