Abstract
Over the last decade, historians have transformed our understanding of the racialised and gendered order of the asylum in southern Africa and of colonial psychiatry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.2 Based on government and institutional documents, the writings of colonial psychiatrists, case histories and hospital registers, much of the small but growing body of recent work has been profoundly influenced by Foucault’s understanding of the nature of power in the clinic and the asylum, and has examined the contradictions between the universalist discourse of European medicine, colonial psychiatric theory, and colonial asylum practice.3 It has argued powerfully that in South Africa the discipline of psychiatry ‘played a key role in legitimising … [a range of] interventions’ to ‘confine, regulate and control disordered and deviant behaviour that might pose a threat to [white] society’.4 Through psychiatric classification, it is alleged that patients were stripped of their identity.5 At the same time, as racial, class and gender hierarchies were entrenched in the asylum by medical superintendents who were in the mainstream of contemporary scientific thinking, their theories of the undeveloped and primitive nature of ‘the native mind’ served to legitimate colonial racism.
The asylum was to be a home, where the patient was to be known and treated as an individual … Mental patients required dedicated and unremitting care, which could not be administered on a mass basis, but rather must be flexible and adapted to the needs and progress of each case. Such a regime demanded kindness and an unusual degree of forbearance on the part of the staff. If this ideal were to be successfully realised the attendants would have to keep constantly in mind the idea ‘that the patient is really under the influence of a disease, which deprives him of responsibility, and frequently leads him into expressions and conduct the most opposite to his character and natural disposition.’ For this teaching to be successful and since the attendant was the person who had the most extensive and intimate contact with the patient, attendants should be selected for their intelligence and upright moral character.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Andrew T. Scull, Museums of Madness: The Social Organization of Insanity in Nineteenth-Century England (Harmondsworth: 1982), p. 102,
citing Samuel Tuke, Description of the Retreat (York: 1813), p. 175.
Megan Vaughan’s chapter, ‘The Madman and the Medicine Men: Colonial Psychiatry and the Theory of Deculturation’ in Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Cambridge: 1991) and her ‘Idioms of Madness: Zomba Lunatic Asylum, Nyasaland, in the Colonial Period’, Journal of Southern African Studies (hereafter JSAS), 9, 2 (1983), were the pioneering works.
Since then, six theses have transformed our understanding of history of southern Africa’s mental institutions over the last decade: Harriet Deacon, ‘A History of the Medical Institutions on Robben Island, Cape Colony, 1846–1910’ (Ph.D., Cambridge University, 1994);
Sally Swartz, ‘Colonialism and the Production of Psychiatric Knowledge at the Cape 1891–1920’ (Ph.D., University of Cape Town: 1996);
Felicity Swanson, ‘“Of Unsound Mind”: A History of Three Eastern Cape Mental Institutions, 1875–1910’ (M.A., University of Cape Town: 2001);
Lynette Jackson, ‘Surfacing Up: Madness, Institutionalization and Social Order in Colonial Zimbabwe’ (Ph.D., Columbia University, New York: 2001);
Julie Parle, ‘States of Mind: Mental Illness and the Quest for Mental Health in Natal and Zululand’ (Ph.D., University of KwaZulu-Natal: 2004);
and Tiffany F. Jones, ‘“Disordered” States: Views about Mental Disorder and the Management of the Made in South Africa, 1939–1989’ (Ph.D., Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario: 2004). I have drawn heavily on their insights. Although nurses and attendants receive some attention in these texts, their main concerns lie elsewhere. Only Lynette Jackson’s thesis has been published.
The quotation is from Swanson, ‘A History of Three Eastern Cape Mental Institutions’, p. 19; see also Swartz, ‘Colonialism and the Production of Psychiatric Knowledge’, passim. For my reservations, see Marks, ‘“Every Facility that Modern Science and Enlightened Humanity have Devised”: Race and Progress in a Colonial Hospital, Valkenberg Mental Asylum, Cape Colony, 1894–1910’, J. Melling and B. Forsythe, Insanity, Institutions and Society: New Research in the Social History of Madness (London: 1999), pp. 268–91.
Julie Parle, ‘States of Mind: Mental Illness and the Quest for Mental Health in Natal and Zululand’ (Ph.D., University of KwaZulu-Natal: 2004), pp. 6–8.
Only 21 of the 3222 cases in the sample Rob Turrell analyzed over those years were referred to psychiatric experts for assessment; Robert V. Turrell, White Mercy: A History of Murder and Rape in South Africa (Westport, CT: 2004). This is not to say that psychological theories had no impact on criminology in South Africa. As Martin Chanock has shown, ‘arguments based upon a genetic mental degeneracy linked to crime … flourished in a fertile South African soil’, and these ideas could be found in policy, political and popular debate.
(M. Chanock, The Making of South African Legal Culture 1902–1936 (Cambridge: 2001), pp. 76–82. The quotation is on p. 76.).
Robert Dingwall, Anne Marie Rafferty and Charles Webster, An Introduction to the Social History of Nursing (London: 1988), pp. 124–5.
Sally Swartz, ‘Changing Diagnoses in Valkenberg Asylum, Cape, 1891–1920: A longitudinal view’, History of Psychiatry, 6 (1995) 433.
This paragraph draws heavily on the overview of the development of mental asylums in the Eastern Cape, in Swanson, ‘Three Eastern Cape Mental Institutions’. (the quotation is on p. 2); also H. Deacon: ‘Remembering tragedy, constructing modernity: Robben Island as a National Monument’ in S. Nuttall and C. Coetzee, eds Negotiating the past: The making of memory in South Africa (Cape Town: 1998), p. 173 and more generally her ‘A History of … Robben Island’.See also M. M. Minde, ‘History of Mental Health Services in South Africa. Part III: The Cape Province’, South African Medical Journal (2 November 1974) 2230–4.
For previous attempts to implement ‘moral management’ on Robben Island, see Deacon, ‘History of … Robben Island’, passim.; for the sense of crisis in Britain and America, see, for example, Scull, Museums of Madness, pp. 194–200, 208 ff and Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac (New York: 1997), pp. 46–7.
There is some uncertainty about Amelia Fraser; according to Charlotte Searle, ‘Amelia Fraser of the Grahamstown Asylum was awarded the first certificate [of the MPA] to be granted in the Cape [on 18 February 1893] …. This launched the training of mental nurses in South Africa.’ C. Searle, The History of the Development of Nursing in South Africa, 1652–1960 (Epping, Cape: 1965) 117. According to Dodds’s correspondence with the colonial office, Fraser came from the UK.
For the differential impact of proletarianization of Afrikaner men and women, see Belinda Bozzoli’s seminal article, ‘Marxism, Feminism and South African Studies’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 9, 2 (1983) 139–71. The gendered Afrikaner and English assumptions about asylum nursing are hinted at in Searle, History of Nursing, pp. 118–9.
C.G. Cassidy, Superintendent of Valkenberg, ‘The Mental Nurse’, South African Nursing Record, 5, 4 (January 1918) 84.
UG 20–34. Union of South Africa. Report of the Commissioner for Mental Hygiene. Statistical Tables 1930, 1931 and 1932 (Pretoria: 1934), pp. iv–vii.
UG 36–37. Union of SA: Report of the Mental Hospitals Departmental Committee 1936–1937 (Pretoria 1937), p. 7.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2007 Shula Marks
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Marks, S. (2007). The Microphysics of Power: Mental Nursing in South Africa in the First Half of the Twentieth Century. In: Mahone, S., Vaughan, M. (eds) Psychiatry and Empire. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230593244_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230593244_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-52413-6
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-59324-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)