Caitlin Murray

The 'Colouring of the Psychosis': Interpreting Insanity in the Primitive Mind^*

How did Aboriginal people experience and exhibit mental disease? How did the colouring of black insanity differ from that of white madness? And what could the study of Aboriginal insanity tell observers about the nature of society and evolution? These were some of the questions posed by interested white psychiatrists from the late 1880s to the early 1920s. In this article, I explore how Western medical doctors understood Aboriginal insanity during this period, and draw out some of the influences and motivations that shaped their conclusions. I also examine the occasionally unexpected ways in which interpreting insanity in the 'primitive' mind destabilised and reinforced conceptions of madness and race.

The primitive does as little thinking as possible; a state of affairs that is reflected in his insanities (J. Bostock, 1923).¹

Dr John Bostock made this comment during a presentation to fellow delegates at the Australasian Medical Congress held at the Wesley Church in Melbourne in 1923. The conference was held under the auspices of the British Medical Association and was opened by His Excellency the Governor General of Australia, Lord Forster, who was but one of many dignitaries in attendance.² Bostock himself went on to have a long and distinguished career as a professor of medical psychology at the University of Queensland, but at the time of the 1923 conference he was a young medical officer at Callan Park Mental Hospital in New South Wales. The young psychiatrist's comment about the nature of 'primitive insanity' was part of a paper entitled "Insanity in the Australian Aboriginal and its Bearing on the Evolution of Mental Disease."³ There is no record of how Bostock's presentation was received at the conference, but the following month a notice in the Medical Journal of Australia described it as a 'very important paper.'⁴

Bostock came to the conclusion that Aboriginal people 'did as little thinking as possible,' and therefore suffered from simple insanities, after a consideration of whether or not Aboriginal people had reached the evolutionary stage at which neuroses could exist. There was certainly evidence of psychosis, in his opinion, but was their cerebral development compatible with the less severe mental defects? Bostock argued it was not, and his reasoning is worth quoting at some length. He started by drawing an analogy between Aboriginal mental processes and the operation of an old-fashioned printing press, which 'laboriously printed single copies.'⁵ Bostock stated: 'Its supplanter is infinitely more speedy. The blackfellow's thought issues slowly, whereas the average white is a quick thinker ... So far as I have been able to find,' Bostock continued, 'no estimate has been made of the exact mental age of the aboriginal, in terms of the higher races, but all travellers are agreed as to the simplicity of his thought processes.' And finally, claimed Bostock: 'His emotions as shown by his insanities are of the crude or "all or nothing" thalamic pattern. There is mania and melancholia, but the varying lights and shades and half tones of the white are missing.'⁶

Bostock's comments bring into stark relief the explicit comparisons drawn between white and black madness in Australian medical literature during the early 1920s. White people suffered from neuroses, Aboriginal people did not. The white mind was highly evolved, the Aboriginal brain lowly developed. White madness was complex, intricate and multifaceted; Aboriginal insanity was simple, crude and primitive. Bostock's observations were filtered through the discourse of racial classification and ranking. White European civilisation represented the pinnacle of human evolution, while Aboriginal society occupied the base. His interpretation of Aboriginal insanity was thus framed through a dichotomous relationship with white madness.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the complex intersections between race and madness in medical discourse from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To this end I will discuss a series of articles on the subject of Aboriginal insanity that appeared in Australian and international medical journals and conference proceedings from the late 1880s through to the 1920s. I will argue that because the concept of madness itself is racialised, interpretations of Aboriginal insanity from the early 1920s disrupted traditional oppositions between madness and reason, but maintained hierarchies based on race. In the following sections, I will discuss this medical literature in depth, focusing on two key historical moments: the 1923 Australasian Medical Congress already mentioned, and a similar conference held more than thirty years earlier, in 1889. First, however, my argument requires some elaboration in order to understand how the discourse of madness is racialised, and how medical interpretations of Aboriginal insanity both destabilised and supported long-established notions of race and madness.

Madness and reason exist in an oppositional relationship. What is considered normal defines what is considered insane in society and vice versa, and these constructions can change over time. Some common dualisms associated with the reason versus madness paradigm include: rationality versus irrationality, thinking versus feeling, maturity versus childishness, humanity versus animality, virtue versus perversity, civilisation versus savagery, and so on. The white madman is the 'other,' often characterised in highly racial terms as wild, savage, primitive, unreasoned, childlike, untamed, bestial and sometimes sexually promiscuous or deviant.⁷ The madman's whiteness is thus contaminated and threatened.

Interpretations of Aboriginal insanity in the early 1920s, however, complicated this characterisation. Aboriginal people were already situated as the 'other' to white civilisation. They were already characterised as crude and simple, childish and devoid of reasoning, and often sexual and animal in nature. So rather than being understood as the opposite of normal Aboriginal behaviour, I would argue that Aboriginal insanity was interpreted as the most exaggerated expression of their innate primitiveness and savagery.⁸ The elevation of white madness in this interpretation was explicit. White madness became more sophisticated and complex by comparison, thereby losing some of its negative taint. Interpreting Aboriginal insanity through the already racialised discourse of madness had the strange effect of normalising Aboriginal madness and elevating white madness, thus destabilising the opposition between reason and madness, while preserving racial hierarchies. I will develop this argument further when I return to Dr John Bostock and the 1923 Australasian Medical Congress in the third section of this paper. First, however, I will trace the development of the Aboriginal insanity narrative, which begins at a conference held much earlier, in 1889.

Savage Insanity in a Civilised World: Dr F. Norton Manning and the 1889 Intercolonial Medical Congress of Australasia

In 1889, the Intercolonial Medical Congress of Australasia included in its proceedings, for the first time, a section devoted to psychological medicine. By coincidence, this conference was also held in Melbourne, on the grounds of the university. The officers of the Victorian Lunacy Department were, apparently, most hospitable to their interstate guests and the conference afforded many Australian psychiatrists the opportunity to meet their confrères in person for the first time.⁹ The section was presided over by Dr F. Norton Manning, who travelled from New South Wales to attend the conference. Manning was, at that time, well established in his career. He was Inspector-General of the Insane in New South Wales (in his words, the 'mother Colony') and a lecturer on psychological medicine at the University of Sydney. In his lengthy presidential address to conference delegates, Manning covered such standard topics as lunacy law, rates of insanity and asylum conditions. However, he also presented another, more original paper, this one entitled 'Insanity in Australian Aborigines, with a Brief Analysis of Thirty-Two Cases.'¹⁰ Discussion of insanity in other races (such as Chinese people and American 'Negroes') had previously appeared in international medical literature. Prior to the conference held in 1889, however, Aboriginal insanity had not been considered in any depth.

When Manning came to address the subject at the 1889 Intercolonial Medical Congress, he created an account of Aboriginal insanity that was to prove highly influential. He reported that insanity was extremely rare among Aboriginal people in their 'primitive and uncivilised condition.'¹¹ He argued that the Aboriginal race suppressed mental disease by carrying out the 'great principle of survival of the fittest.'¹² Aboriginal people, Manning asserted, treated their insane in the same way as most 'savage races': violent or aggressive lunatics were slaughtered, melancholic types were allowed to commit suicide, the demented and helpless were left to die, and those whose erroneous ideas did not result in offensive acts were left in peace and sometimes revered as superior and inspired beings.¹³ He also argued that strict marriage laws prevented hereditary insanity, while their 'simple and uneventful existence' sheltered them from worry and strain.¹⁴ Manning's account of the rarity of insanity in Aboriginal society prior to colonisation thus evoked a savage, yet somehow innocent, time when evolution was free to operate naturally.

This rarity was, however, but one part of the story. The narrative continues. According to Manning, after contact with civilisation, or, more accurately, after contact with the vices of civilisation, mental disease among Aboriginal people increased dramatically. The introduction of alcohol and new diseases, as well as changes of life and habits, were believed to be responsible for the demise of the race and the increasing incidence of insanity.¹⁵ In the colony of New South Wales, Manning stated that: 'We have ... passed from a period in which insanity was almost unknown among the native race, to one in which it is almost twice as common as among the European race.'¹⁶ To explain this increase, Manning described the Aboriginal population of New South Wales as 'a miserable remnant, supported for the most part by the Government, afflicted with the vices and diseases of civilisation, and devoid of the nobler and better characteristics of the race.'¹⁷ Thus, the picture is clear. The noble savage of the innocent past fell before the wave of civilisation and, unable to compete, descended into madness.

Manning's assertions blazed a trail through international academic literature in the following decades. In April 1890, D. Hack Tuke summarised Manning's paper in the British Journal of Mental Science.¹⁸ In the same month, on the other side of the Atlantic, a précis of his work also appeared in the American journal Science, under the section 'Health Matters.'¹⁹ Many years later, in 1913, Manning's findings on Aboriginal insanity were translated virtually word for word by Dr Ziem in an article entitled 'L'Alienation Mentale en Oceanie' (Mental Alienation in Oceania), which appeared in the French journal Archives Internationales de Neurologie.²⁰ In 1922, Manning's conclusions again crossed the Atlantic. That year the curator of the physical anthropology department at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, Dr Arles Hrdlicka, published the article 'Anthropology and Insanity' in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease.²¹ Hrdlicka stated (this time referencing Ziem) that native life was one of 'little mental stress' with 'no great struggle for existence' and 'no striving in any direction.'²² He continued: 'The Australians lived largely a higher animal sort of existence, which did not call for any great exertion on the part of the brain and nervous system.'²³ He repeated the assertion that maniacs were 'done away with,' the depressed were allowed to 'do away with themselves' and epileptics were 'driven away.'²⁴ Hrdlicka described this as a 'remarkable primitive sort of way of eliminating the undesirable portions of the race.'²⁵ Hrdlicka also asserted that the 'advent of the whites heralded a dramatic increase in mental disease among the Aboriginal population.'²⁶ Finally, quoting Hrdlicka, the influential Australian researcher Dr J. Burton Cleland repeated Manning's assertion again in a 1928 article on Aboriginal insanity in the British publication Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.²⁷ Manning's Aboriginal insanity narrative had become accepted wisdom by the 1920s, although much of the language had become less nostalgic. Aboriginal people supposedly led a 'higher animal' existence, savagely 'doing away with' or neglecting their insane. After contact with 'advanced' white civilisation, the ignoble savage succumbed to mental disease.

Having traced the path of Manning's assertions, the obvious question is: Was Manning right? Was there little or no mental illness in Aboriginal society prior to colonisation? Did it increase after contact with Europeans? And how were Aboriginal 'lunatics' treated? These questions are probably largely unanswerable. However, it is possible to evaluate the evidence upon which Manning based his conclusions, as this evidence was fairly scant. It amounted to four, short, isolated statements written during the 1870s and 1880s in larger anthropological works on Australian Aborigines. Phillip Chauncy wrote in 1878: 'I have never observed insanity, or hereditary or chronic* complaints among the natives [*except in those vitiated by white people].'²⁸ James Dawson was quoted as stating:

Suicide is uncommon and cases of insanity are rarely met with, but the Aborigines believe that there is more of it since the use of intoxicating liquors, and especially since they began to disregard their laws of consanguinity in marriage.²⁹

In The Australian Race, published is 1886, Edward Curr wrote: 'Gout does not exist, and madness and inflammation of the brain are almost if not quite unknown.'³⁰ And, finally, George Taplin wrote: 'I have seen several cases of lunacy among them; it is not uncommon for the intellect of old men to give way, and for them to be insane.'³¹ This brief and often contradictory evidence was made to fit Manning's narrative. For example, in order to prove the absence of insanity among Aboriginal people in their 'primitive condition,' Manning quoted the passage by Edward Curr. Yet to prove the increase of insanity, he drew on the statement by George Taplin published in the same volume. Interestingly, Taplin also wrote that: 'The relatives of lunatics have no superstitious ideas about them, and treat them very kindly—they are rather afraid of them.'³² This piece of information did not, however, fit into Manning's portrayal of Aboriginal people savagely slaughtering their insane and was not included in his story. To what extent the isolated observations of anthropologists who studied specific Aboriginal groups constituted a reliable body of evidence upon which to generalise about an entire continent of people over thousands of years is debatable in the extreme. What is certain, however, is that the more times Manning's rather embellished narrative was repeated, the more 'true' it became.

Perhaps, however, the more important (and potentially more answerable) questions should be: What did Manning and his followers hope to prove or justify with this Aboriginal insanity narrative? And, how were Aboriginal people portrayed as a result? In a previous address to the Medical Section of the Royal Society of New South Wales in 1880, Manning argued that mental anxiety caused by the strain and pressures of modern living was a chief cause of insanity among the general population.³³ Harking back to a simpler, insanity-free pre-colonisation society, provided the means for Manning to critique European civilisation and prove his argument. The second part of the narrative, about the fall of Aboriginal people into vice and madness, served a different purpose. The Indigenous inhabitants, the narrative implied, simply could not compete with the advanced white European civilisation. Survival of the fittest was, accordingly, the ultimate test and colonisation simply nature's way. Thus, the Aboriginal insanity narrative provided a vehicle through which Manning could simultaneously critique late nineteenth-century Australian society and justify its existence. The narrative also nourished the image (already deeply entrenched in the scientific discourse of the late nineteenth century) of Aboriginal people as primitive beings, caught in the modern world yet representing the earliest stages of human development. This positioning of Aboriginal people as evolutionary relics proved to be highly significant when Bostock and his fellow conference delegate, Dr C. A. Hogg, came to analyse primitive insanity at the 1923 Australasian Medical Congress.

Insanity and the Primitive: Dr John Bostock, Dr C. A. Hogg and the 1923 Australasian Medical Congress

The 1923 conference described at the start of this paper represented somewhat of a peak of medical interest in Aboriginal insanity (although the subject never really occupied centre stage in psychological debates). In addition to Bostock's contribution, another Sydney psychiatrist, Dr C. A. Hogg, presented a paper on Aboriginal insanity entitled "Twelve Cases of Insanity in Australian Aboriginals with a Commentary."³⁴ Bostock explained this sudden medical interest in Aboriginal insanity by referring to the supposed 'passing' of the Aboriginal race. Like many of his contemporaries, Bostock considered Aboriginal people to be a surviving relic of antiquity. Following the path set by Manning's narrative, Bostock characterised Aboriginal people as throw-backs to the primitive stages of human development, perhaps more animal than human, preserved through isolation on an island continent. Bostock described this condition as 'Nature's beautiful experiment in encircling Australia with the high seas.'³⁵ It was generally accepted that in contact with advanced European civilisation these primitive savages were destined to die out and become extinct, quietly passing before the wave of progress.³⁶ This was deemed a great tragedy in the world of science, for with the passing of the Aborigine went the chance to understand the early history of humankind. Bostock told his colleagues at the conference: 'Posterity will judge us adversely if we let him ["the 'Grand Old Man' of the human race"] die without taking his full and complete measure.'³⁷ For Bostock, the task of the scientist was clear—to map out the anatomical, morphological and psychological characteristics of the disappearing race. 'Nothing less,' he stated, 'than a complete psychological-physiological examination should be the goal.'³⁸ While anatomists and physical anthropologists dissected brains and collected skeletons, Bostock studied what he considered to be the living specimen. His contribution was an attempt 'to describe the form of the insanities of the aboriginal, to show how the colouring differs from the white, to draw inferences with regard to primitive psychology and finally to demonstrate in what respects evolution has taken place.'³⁹ In this section, I will discuss the conclusions that Bostock and Hogg reached following their psychological examinations of Aboriginal subjects.

Like their predecessor, Dr F. Norton Manning, Bostock and Hogg worked on the assumption that Aboriginal people were primitive beings. However, the papers they presented at the 1923 conference were based on a much more explicit characterisation of the Aboriginal brain as a primitive organ. As Bostock's likening of Aboriginal thought processes to the laborious functioning of an old-fashioned printing press suggests, the primitive Aboriginal being was supposedly possessed of a lowly developed cerebral structure. The history of comparing the weight and form of the Aboriginal brain and skull to those of other races and hominoids, such as apes and chimpanzees, in order to 'prove' their primitiveness has been well documented in studies on scientific racism.⁴⁰ Racial theories pervaded many areas of scientific investigation, including those related to psychiatry. In the early 1900s, the New South Wales Lunacy Department had its own pathological laboratory in which to study human remains. In the laboratory's report from 1908, Dr J. Froude Flashman published a study on the morphology of the Aboriginal brain. He found the Aborigine to be a primitive member of the human race 'so far as concerns the occipital region,' and the 'rhinencephalon,' that is, the frontal region of the brain and the part responsible for smell.⁴¹ Similarly, while working alongside Flashman, Dr Herman Klaatsch conducted a study on a collection of Aboriginal skulls in which he described Aboriginal people as a 'relic.' Klaatsch found that a great number were 'wanting' in the development of large frontal eminences. The enlargement of the frontal eminence was supposed to represent the 'transition from lower to higher types of mankind.'⁴² Finally, to take an example directly from the psychiatric literature already cited, Dr Ziem stated that Aboriginal people had a 'cerveau petit, lobe frontal moins large, moins long et moins haut, [et] circonvolutions plus simples et plus marquées' (small brain, frontal lobe which is less wide, less long and less high, and more simple, more marked gyrus or convolutions).⁴³ Aboriginal brain structures were thus constructed as primitive and lowly evolved in contemporary scientific and medical discourse.

In addition to anatomical studies of Aboriginal cerebral structures, the psychiatrists also seem to have been influenced by international literature on 'primitive psychology.' Bostock, in particular, made explicit references to the prominent French psychologist, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, in his paper on Aboriginal insanity. Lévy-Bruhl's major work Primitive Mentality⁴⁴ was published in English during the same year as the conference, and may well have served as a catalyst for Bostock's interest in the subject of Aboriginal insanity. Lévy-Bruhl characterised the thought processes of all 'primitive peoples,' including Aboriginal Australians, as mystical, pre-logical and deficient in the powers of abstract reasoning and reflection. Lévy-Bruhl argued that 'primitives' displayed a 'decided distaste for reasoning, for what logicians call the "discursive operations of thought."'⁴⁵ Bostock mirrored this assertion in his article, stating: 'So far as abstract cerebration is concerned, there is a lack of "discursive operation of thought."'⁴⁶ Lévy-Bruhl essentially argued that primitive mentality was characterised by a dislike for logical reasoning. The parallels between this argument and Bostock's comment that 'primitives do as little thinking as possible' are clear. When Bostock and Hogg came to interpret Aboriginal insanity at the 1923 conference, they were following a course set over many decades by anthropologists, anatomists and psychologists who dissected Aboriginal brains and analysed primitive psychology.

At the 1923 conference, Bostock vigorously applied the idea that Aboriginal people were deficient in abstract cerebration and reasoning power (due to their lowly evolved brain structures) to his interpretation of Aboriginal insanity. We have already encountered Bostock's assertions about the lack of neuroses in Aboriginal people. His arguments were, however, far more expansive. Bostock characterised Aboriginal psychology as childlike and simple, stating: 'Just as a child either reacts to unpleasant stimuli by an attack of hypomania, screaming or crying or by depression, sulking, so does the aboriginal lack the finer reactions.'⁴⁷ Similarly, he asserted that while Aboriginal people suffered from crude psychoses, such as manic-depression (bi-polar disorder), dementia-praecox (schizophrenia) and general paralysis of the insane (a tertiary stage of syphilis), Aboriginal mental disease did not, he argued, manifest itself in complex delusions or paranoia.⁴⁸ Bostock stated: 'The possession of a high grade systematized delusional system is only possible with a cerebral development more advanced that that of the aboriginal.'⁴⁹ In the case of hallucinations, he claimed that visual hallucinations were more common in Aboriginal people than auditory hallucinations, most likely, he argued, because Aboriginal people lacked an extensive vocabulary.⁵⁰ Bostock thus painted a picture of Aboriginal insanity as crude, uncomplicated, childlike and lowly evolved.

A deeper reading of Bostock's observations also exposes the meanings he ascribed to white madness. The 'evidence' upon which Bostock based his observations came from comparing a series of Aboriginal case notes with an equal number of cases from an 'old "white" case book.'⁵¹ He described the white case book as a 'control,' but this was not an objective, value-free category. When Bostock asserted that the Aboriginal madman possessed a primitive cerebral structure and did 'as little thinking as possible,' he implicitly elevated white insanity to a highly developed level of complexity. Similarly, by arguing that Aboriginal insanity was not characterised by complex delusions, paranoia and neuroses, Bostock implied that these were characteristic of a much more sophisticated, intelligent white madness. Somehow, the white madman had become more complex and more civilised when compared with his Aboriginal counterpart, who inversely became more simple and childlike.

A similar phenomenon can be seen in the work of Dr C.A. Hogg, Medical Superintendent of the Parramatta Mental Hospital. Hogg presented his paper alongside Bostock and drew similar conclusions from his study of twelve cases of Aboriginal insanity.⁵² In comparison with white patients, he argued that these cases showed:

(i.) a want of organization of the sentiments, (ii.) a low form of perception, (iii.) poor association and poverty of ideas, (iv.) absence of inquisitiveness and no constructive ability, [and] (v.) ... their native intelligence far below that of the white.⁵³

Hogg also speculated as to the reason why those few Aboriginal patients who did not die seemed to recover more quickly than white cases. He reasoned:

Probably their lowly developed brains broke down under a smaller strain than would be necessary in the case of the whites and therefore there was less damage to repair and a lower standard of normality (black) [sic] for them to attain before they could be considered as recovered.⁵⁴

Hogg, however, depicted Aboriginal insanity as not merely simple, but also animal and sexual in nature. Again in comparison with white patients, he argued that the Aboriginal insane displayed: '(vi.) little power to appreciate and adapt themselves to the social standards of honesty and sexual morality et cetera which are those of the white community, [and] (vii.) strong and ruling passions of the animal nature.'⁵⁵ Thus, working on the assumption of biological inferiority and innate savagery, Hogg positioned Aboriginal mental patients as more childlike, more bestial, more perverse and less rational than their white counterparts. Again, these observations implicitly elevated white insanity, thereby complicating traditional dualisms associated with madness, while upholding hierarchies based on race.

Conclusion

Medical discourse in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries drew a specific picture of Aboriginal insanity. According to the narrative, insanity was a rare occurrence during the savage yet somehow innocent time of Aboriginal isolation on the island continent of Australia. However, the coming of the 'superior' white civilisation heralded the demise of this 'savage race.' Unable to compete and having adopted the worst elements of civilisation, Aboriginal people succumbed to insanity. The medical professionals who subsequently interpreted this insanity in the 1920s worked within the confines of a scientific discourse that positioned Aboriginal people as primitive, savage, childlike and bestial. Bostock and Hogg worked on the assumption that Aboriginal cerebral structures were primitive and undeveloped in contrast with the highly evolved white brain. In comparison with white mental disease, they argued that Aboriginal insanity was characterised by childish reactions, simplicity of thought and absence of reason, as well as often sexual and animal behaviour. Yet white madness itself was not normally immune to this sort of characterisation. Somehow when compared with his black counterpart, the white madman had become more complex and sophisticated. Aboriginal madness was thus normalised, while white madness was elevated to a higher level. The Aboriginal madman became more savage and more of an 'other,' while the white madman became less savage and less of an 'other.' Thus, although the layering of race onto interpretations of insanity disrupted traditional oppositions between madness and reason, racial hierarchies were maintained.

University of Melbourne

Acknowledgments

This paper is based on preliminary research presented at the 'Historicising Whiteness' Conference, University of Melbourne, 22–24 November 2006. My paper is included in the online conference proceedings: Historicising Whiteness: Transnational Perspectives on the Construction of an Identity (Melbourne, Vic.: RMIT Press, 2007); URL not available at time of printing. I would like to thank Tracey Banivanua-Mar, Kat Ellinghaus, Ian Anderson, Joy Damousi, Elizabeth Malcolm and Warwick Anderson for their helpful suggestions and comments on my work.

Notes

^*Some of the terms used in this article, such as 'Aboriginal insanity,' 'mental disease,' 'race,' 'savage,' and 'primitive,' are highly problematic, but reflect the language used in my sources. Inverted commas have been used occasionally to demonstrate the constructed nature of these terms, but have been taken out in most instances.

^1. John Bostock, "Insanity in the Australian Aboriginal and its Bearing on the Evolution of Mental Disease," Medical Journal of Australia, vol. 2, supplement (1924): 459–64, 462.

^2. "Inagural Meeting," Medical Journal of Australia, vol. 1, supplement (1924): 5.

^3. Bostock, 459–64.

^4. "Section VIII–Neurology: Insanity in the Australian Aboriginal," Medical Journal of Australia, vol. 2 (1923): 644.

^5.Ibid., 462.

^6.Ibid.

^7. For a discussion of the association between wildness, madness and race see Hayden White, "The Forms of Wildness: Archaeology of an Idea," in The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism, edited by Edward Dudley and Maximillian E. Novak (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), 3–38; also Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 131–49. For a general discussion of the 'othering' of the Western madman, see Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilisation (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965).

^8. Vaughan makes a similar argument in her chapter on African madness in Megan Vaughan, Curing their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 100–28. Swartz also discusses the intersections between race and insanity in the African context in Sally Swartz, "Colonizing the Insane: Causes of Insanity in the Cape, 1891–1920," History of the Human Sciences, vol. 8, no. 4 (1995): 39–57.

^9. D. Hack Tuke, "Colonial Retrospect," Journal of Mental Science, vol. 35 (1889): 124–28.

^10. F. Norton Manning, "Insanity in Australian Aborigines, with a Brief Analysis of Thirty-Two Cases," in Transactions of the Intercolonial Medical Congress of Australasia, 2^nd Session, Melbourne, 1989 (Melbourne, Vic.: Stillwell and Co., 1890), 857–60.

^11.Ibid., 857.

^12.Ibid., 858.

^13.Ibid., 857–8.

^14.Ibid., 858.

^15.Ibid., 858–9.

^16.Ibid., 859.

^17.Ibid., 858.

^18. D. Hack Tuke, "Australian Retrospect," Journal of Mental Science, vol. 36 (1890): 276–8.

^19. "Health Matters: Insanity in Australian Aborigines," Science, vol. 15 (1890): 219–20.

^20. Ziem, "L'Alienation mentale en Oceanie," Archives Internationales de Neurologie, vol. 2 (1913): 240–55, 240–1. No first name or initial is given in this article. Title translated by author.

^21. Ales Hrdlicka, "Anthropology and Insanity," Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, vol. 56 (1922): 215–35, 222–4.

^22.Ibid., 223.

^23.Ibid.

^24.Ibid.

^25.Ibid.

^26.Ibid.

^27. J. Burton Cleland, "Disease Amongst the Australian Aborigines: Section III–Epilepsy and Insanity," Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, vol. 31 (1928): 53–9, 262–6, 281–2, 290–4, 307–13 and 326–30, 262.

^28. Phillip Chauncy, "Notes and Anecdotes of the Aborigines of Australia," Appendix A in R. Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria with Notes Relating to the Habits of the Natives of other Parts of Australia and Tasmania, Vol. II (Melbourne, Vic.: Government Printer, 1878), 254.

^29. Manning, "Insanity," 858. Manning does not give an exact quotation, but rather a summary of Dawson's writing. For the original see James Dawson, Australian Aborigines: The Languages and Customs of Several Tribes of Aborigines in the Western District of Victoria, Australia (Melbourne, Vic., Sydney, NSW and Adelaide, SA: George Robertson, 1881), 61–3.

^30. Edward Curr, The Australian Race: Its Origin, Languages, Customs, Place of Landing in Australia and the Routes by which it Spread Itself over that Continent, Vol. I (Melbourne, Vic.: John Ferres, Government Printer, 1886), 208.

^31. George Taplin, "From the Banks of the Murray River, Where it Enters Lake Alexandrina to the Embouchure of that River and Lacepede Bay," extract number 83 in Curr, Vol II, 260.

^32.Ibid.

^33. F. Norton Manning, The Causation and Prevention of Insanity (Sydney, NSW: Government Printer, 1880), 13–14.

^34. C. A. Hogg, "Twelve Cases of Insanity in Australian Aboriginals with a Commentary," Medical Journal of Australia, vol. 1, supplement (1924): 455–6, and vol. 2, supplement (1924): 457–8.

^35. Bostock, 459.

^36. For a good survey of the 'passing of the Aborigine' theory, see Russell McGregor, Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880–1939, (Melbourne, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1997).

^37. Bostock, 459.

^38.Ibid.

^39.Ibid.

^40. See for example, Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996) and Richard Glover, "Scientific Racism and the Australian Aboriginal (1865–1915)," in Maps, Dreams, History: Race and Representations in Australia, edited by J. Kociumbas (Sydney, NSW: Department of History, University of Sydney, 1998), 67–130.

^41. J. Froude Flashman, "The Morphology of the Brain of the Australian Aboriginal," in Reports from the Pathological, Department of the Lunacy Department: New South Wales Government, Vol. 1, Part 3 (Sydney, NSW: William Applegate Gullick, Government Printers, 1908), 41.

^42. Herman Klaatsch, "The Skull of the Australian Aboriginal," in Reports from the Pathological Department of the Lunacy Department: New South Wales Government, Vol. 1, Part 3 (Sydney, NSW: William Applegate Gullick, Government Printers, 1908), 122.

^43. Ziem, 246. Passage translated by author.

^44. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Primitive Mentality (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1923).

^45.Ibid., 21.

^46. Bostock, 462.

^47.Ibid., 459.

^48.Ibid., 459–64.

^49.Ibid., 461.

^50.Ibid., 460.

^51.Ibid., 459–60.

^52. Hogg, 455–8.

^53.Ibid., 455.

^54.Ibid.

^55.Ibid.

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