Challenging institutional hegemony: family visitors to hospitals for the insane in Australia and New Zealand, 1880s-1910s.
Historians have increasingly come to identify that there was considerable traffic between nineteenth-century psychiatric institutions and the world beyond, with official visitors recording details of their regular forays inside asylum walls, and sometimes family members visiting the institution to check on treatments, patients' progress and welfare. This chapter explores the broad array of experiences of asylum visitors in colonial Australia and New Zealand, focusing on families and their responses to the institution. It draws upon a range of materials to show that visitors found their way inside the hospital for the insane, both in their letters and through their actual physical presence. Through these glimpses, it suggests that the asylum itself should be unsettled as the focus of all the meanings of insanity and its cure.
University of Waikato, New Zealand.
Catharine
C
Coleborne
D001315:Australia; D005190:Family; D049672:History, 19th Century; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006778:Hospitals, Psychiatric / Q000266:history*; D006801:Humans; D001523:Mental Disorders / Q000266:history*; D009520:New Zealand; D011368:Professional-Family Relations; D012934:Social Isolation; D014789:Visitors to Patients / Q000266:history*