Settling the mind: psychiatry and the colonial project in Australia

© 2012 Dr. Caitlin Sue MurraySet in Australia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Settling the Mind tells the story of three Sydney psychiatrists who sought to understand the relationship between race, nativity and madness: Frederic Norton Manning, Chisholm Ross and John Bostock. Their influential (albeit limited) contributions to comparative psychiatry centred on insanity in Aboriginal people, immigrants and native-born settlers. Drawing on asylum case records, official government reports, scientific studies and medical literature from the period, this thesis argues that the doctors’ interpretations of mental disease in ‘others’ were, in the main, reflections of their own concerns and self-image. Manning, Ross and Bostock’s preoccupations with notions of progress and degeneration, belonging and maladjustment, and superiority and inferiority so shaped their findings and distorted their conclusions that the patients upon whom their studies were based all but disappeared from view. Through a deep analysis of the doctors’ writings, this thesis tentatively recovers traces of these patients. Settling the Mind also, however, takes a much wider view, charting the spread of medical knowledge about madness in ‘other’ peoples across borders and between nations from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. In so doing, it not only illuminates Manning, Ross and Bostock’s scholarly inheritance, but also sheds light on two persistent and seemingly contradictory facets of the Western medical and scientific imagination: first, the theory that civilisation was a potent cause of insanity; and secondly, the association between madness and savagery. This thesis explores why madness was associated with savagery when it was supposedly caused by civilisation, and how mental disease was interpreted in peoples already defined as savage, and thus mad, by nature. It argues that from the late nineteenth century, comparative psychiatry destabilised the opposition between madness and reason, just as it reflected and informed emerging neurological and psychological theories about the nature of insanity itself