Media: BOOK - paperback, 280 pages
Author: S. Luke
Year: 2018
ISBN: 9781925588965
Other: b&w photos, bibliog, index
Publisher: Australian Scholarly Publishing

Tales of Victorian-era madness have imbued twenty-first century minds with images of inconvenient husbands and wives locked up in attics or diseased madhouses in the English countryside withouth hope of real care of release. But what was the reality faced by the 'insane' in nineteenth-century New South Wales?

In 1874 Sir Henry Parkes purchased the pleasure grounds that were Callan Park and turned them into the jewel in the crown of New South Wales' mental health card. Despite local protests, Garryowen House became the site's first hospital - equipped with a cricket pitch, far, orchard and zoo. Soon the asylum proper was built and became home to over 700 patients.

'Callan Park: Hospital for the Insane' uses Victorian-era medical files to explore the lives of the first patients and staff of the early hospital, detailing their daily routing, treatment, escapes and cures.

Contents:
Acknowledgements
Preface
Note on the sources

Part One: The Hospital
1. Callan Park: Branch establishment at the 'first forty-four'
2. The mental state of Australia
3. The kirkbride complex
4. Attendants and the routine
5. The admission process

Part Two: The Patients
6. Men very far from home
7. Geoge Morton
8. Samuel Payne
9. Escapees
10. Voluntary admissions
11. Recovered
12. Chronic patients
Epilogue