Content area
Full text
Articles
Our research, which this article retrospectively examines, was generously supported by the Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund, 08-UOO-167 SOC.
1
Introduction
Medical histories have increasingly been written at the intersections of social and cultural histories of institutions and their practices. The imperial world of insanity and its confinement included institutions for the insane in colonial societies. The voluminous case history data generated by these past institutions [formula omitted, refer to PDF] namely hospitals for the insane [formula omitted, refer to PDF] has tended to shape and characterise studies of mental illness and its treatments, with a particular focus on the nineteenth century. Scholars have considered administrative practices and the ensuing production of social and political meanings about insanity and its populations in those sites.1This now rich scholarship attests to the value of the enduringly interesting themes emerging from large colonial social institutions and their patient populations. The potential of these institutions to enhance our historical understandings of past peoples and their struggles is enormous: the archive contains 'histories that refract light between colony and "home", the sane and the mad'.2Such records provide opportunities of interpretation, access to 'experiences' of mental health and illness, and to the worlds of peoples before our own era of mental health policy and practice.3
Despite their benefits, historians have been alert to the difficulties in using patient records. These 'lives in the record' are sometimes understood as silenced, obscured or invisible because of the power relations of the institutions themselves. Historians have grappled with the inconsistencies and flaws of psychiatric patient records, calling them 'innately jaundiced'.4Historian Barbara Taylor writes that psychiatric case histories have been disappearing in the present, a result of the widespread process of institutional closures in the late twentieth century. Yet, suggests Taylor, 'without history, people disappear'.5
While recognising the centrality of psychiatric patient case records and the associated difficulties in using them, the methodological processes involved in their collection and interpretation and in the ongoing data management by historians have received relatively limited focused critical attention. We argue that, while historians have talked about the relevance and use of patient records, weighing up their status, and investigating the intellectual problems they present, they have not...