Migration, Ethnicity, and Mental Health by Angela McCarthy Catharine Coleborne

Author:Angela McCarthy, Catharine Coleborne [Angela McCarthy, Catharine Coleborne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138378056
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2018-08-23T00:00:00+00:00

7 Medical Migration and the Treatment of Insanity in New Zealand

The Doctors of Ashburn Hall, Dunedin, 1882–1910

Elspeth Knewstubb

Ashburn Hall in Dunedin, New Zealand’s first and only private lunatic asylum, was established in October 1882 by James Hume, who had been the lay superintendent at the public Dunedin Lunatic Asylum, and Dr. Edward William Alexander. Like other British colonial asylums in the late nineteenth century, Ashburn Hall was run by men who had received their medical educations in Britain.1 The very existence of lunatic asylums in colonial settings marked the colonies as self-consciously ‘British’, showing that colonial management of social and political life compared favourably with that in the metropole.2 This chapter examines three medical superintendents at Ashburn Hall between 1882 and 1910, Edward William Alexander, Frank Hay, and Edward Henry Alexander, who were all influenced by British medical thought. They were, however, subject to many influences, both ‘intellectual’ and ‘cultural’, which shaped their treatment of patients and their interpretations of patient behaviour. The picture offered here shows some of the complexity and variety of influences at play in their medical practices at Ashburn Hall. The doctors’ intellectual worlds were not made of a simple flow from Britain to New Zealand. Travel to other countries for study, reading of international medical writings, and correspondence with other medical practitioners all played a part in forming doctors’ practices at Ashburn Hall.

As well as keeping up to date with medical science, the three doctors were members of the colonial bourgeoisie and, in their writings about patient behaviour, the cultural influences on the doctors’ practices become evident. The doctors measured patient behaviour against bourgeois respectable mores. Patient case notes were characterised by ‘difference’ within the asylum, with gender, ethnic, or religious deviations from bourgeois respectable norms in particular being treated as symptomatic of insanity. The combination of intellectual and cultural influences on doctors’ practices, although unique to individual medical practitioners, was common among New Zealand psychiatrists. The experiences of these three doctors are representative of patterns in New Zealand psychiatry more generally. A closer examination of the three medical superintendents of Ashburn Hall, therefore, highlights the complexity of the influences on New Zealand psychiatry.

This chapter employs a biographical approach, which has been used effectively by some historians to demonstrate developments in the history of psychiatry.3 The Ashburn Hall doctors’ biographies, particularly their education and employment histories, reveal some of the intellectual influences on New Zealand psychiatry. The histories of medical professionals shaped practices of treatment in the colonies they migrated to. The first of the three doctors trained in England and France, whereas the other two trained in Scottish universities and were employed in Scottish asylums. British institutions commonly trained medical professionals for the colonies.4 British medicine, however, was not a homogenous entity in the nineteenth century. Medical courses differed between universities.5 Employment in asylums, post-graduate study, travel to observe practices in Europe or America, and the reading of medical journals all played a part in the formation of medical knowledge. An examination of the

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