Respectability, Religion and Psychiatry in New Zealand: A Case Study of Ashburn Hall, Dunedin, 1882-1910

Abstract

This thesis uses the patient case records from the private asylum Ashburn Hall in Dunedin, New Zealand, between 1882 and 1910 to unpick how and what the three medical superintendents of the asylum during this time thought about the patients they treated, the intellectual and cultural influences at play in forming these judgements, and the complexity of the role of Christianity within the asylum. These three medical superintendents were Edward William Alexander, medical superintendent from 1882 to 1897; Frank Hay, medical superintendent from 1897 to 1904; and Edward Henry Alexander, medical superintendent from 1904 to 1911. This thesis employs a qualitative approach to the doctors’ writings about patients. These writings reveal a range of intellectual influences which can be traced back to their education and employment histories. A range of cultural influences are also present in their judgements about and treatment of patients. Throughout this thesis, the concept of ‘bourgeois respectability’ is used as a tool to gain insight into the three doctors’ judgements of and discourse about their patients. Bourgeois respectability denotes the general system of values and norms which guided the middle-class members of colonial New Zealand’s population. These norms played an important part in the definitions of sane and insane behaviour in the doctors’ writings.

Bourgeois respectability also informed doctors’ discourse and judgements about their patients’ religious expressions and beliefs. The second main focus of this thesis is on religion within Ashburn Hall. Religion in the asylum has been under-examined by historians. In Ashburn Hall it was cast by the doctors as both pathological, in the case of patients with religious delusions, and as potentially therapeutic in some cases. Doctors’ roles took on some aspects of clerical ones, but to characterise doctors as priests obscures the importance and complexity of the roles religion had to play within the asylum. The archives of Ashburn Hall provide a window through which to view the operation of trends in medicine and the operation of social and cultural values on medical judgement in colonial New Zealand.