Article ID: CBB001422139

Reconstructing Harry: A Genealogical Study of a Colonial Family “inside” and “outside” the Grahamstown Asylum, 1888--1918 (2014)

unapi

Wilbraham, Lindy (Author)


Medical History
Volume: 58, no. 2
Issue: 2
Pages: 166-187


Publication Date: 2014
Edition Details: Article in a special issue, “New Directions and Challenges in Histories of Health, Healing and Medicine in South Africa”
Language: English

Recent scholarship has explored the dynamics between families and colonial lunatic asylums in the late nineteenth century, where families actively participated in the processes of custodial care, committal, treatment and release of their relatives. This paper works in this historical field, but with some methodological and theoretical differences. The Foucauldian study is anchored to a single case and family as an illness narrative that moves cross-referentially between bureaucratic state archival material, psychiatric case records, and intergenerational family-storytelling and family photographs. Following headaches and seizures, Harry Walter Wilbraham was medically boarded from his position as Postmaster in the Cape of Good Hope Colony of South Africa with a `permanent disease of the brain', and was committed to the Grahamstown Asylum in 1910, where he died the following year, aged 40 years. In contrast to writings about colonial asylums that usually describe several patient cases and thematic patterns in archival material over time and place, this study's genealogical lens examines one white settler male patient's experiences within mental health care in South Africa between 1908 and 1911. The construction of Harry's `case' interweaves archival sources and reminiscences inside and outside the asylum, and places it within psychiatric discourse of the time, and family dynamics in the years that followed. Thus, this case study maps the constitution of `patient' and `family' in colonial life, c.1888--1918, and considers the calamity, uncertainty, stigma and silences of mental illness.

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Article Parle, Julie; Noble, Vanessa (2014) New Directions and Challenges in Histories of Health, Healing and Medicine in South Africa. Medical History (pp. 147-165). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001422139/

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Authors & Contributors
Bhattacharyya, Anouska
Coleborne, Catharine
Pinto, Sarah Ann
Thabane, Motlatsi
Juliette Rigondet
Dahl, Hilde
Concepts
Psychiatric hospitals
Mental disorders and diseases
Colonialism
Psychiatry
Family
Patients
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, early
20th century
18th century
Places
Australia
New Zealand
India
Bombay (India)
Alberta, Canada
Lesotho
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