as a more nuanced theoretical understanding of the committal and confinement of the insane 
 has emerged in asylum scholarship in recent years , scholars have foregrounded the 
 relationships between families and colonial lunatic asylums .
this writing of families into 
 asylums resists the top - down social - control view of psychiatric institutions as 
 state - controlled repositories for the  dangerous , 
deviant and  defective , 
 and posits instead a more porous and processual view of custodial care which involved 
 intricate negotiations between families , doctors and asylums in the admission and release of 
 troubled and troublesome spouses , parents , children , siblings or servants . 
 
this porous view of custodial care finds the process of committal to implicate 
 sometimes lengthy periods of home and community - based care of mentally ill family members 
 before committal , as a last resort , to which they may intermittently return if and when 
 released from the asylum . 
  as catharine coleborne has argued referring to the colonial asylums in australia and 
 new zealand , families actively participated in the custodial care , asylum admission and 
 release of the mentally ill . 
 
thus , the different colonial contexts of asylums in the extant scholarship have 
 accounted for variations in psychiatric , social and familial practices .
this writing about 
 the work that families do alongside asylums has run along several well - worn paths , which are 
 guided by various methodologies for exploring the available archival materials of colonial 
 asylums .
a broad socio - historical path has examined how the size , function and legitimacy of lunatic 
 asylums swelled exponentially within the nineteenth - century forces of colonial expansion , 
 industrial capitalism and psychiatric professionalisation . 
 
andrew scull s pivotal argument posited that families in england in this era 
 effectively 
dumped relatives in asylums due to the pressures of their waged employment to 
 economically sustain their households . 
 
this view has weathered several challenges . through exploring the criss - crossing web 
 of writing that passed between families , patients and asylums , other paths of scholarship 

have explored how families shaped the medical care and treatment their relatives received in 
 asylums , 
  and cared deeply about their welfare . 
 
coleborne s path - breaking research on the australasian asylums , 
 c.18601918 , has pushed these ideas of family engagement in at least two 
 useful directions .
first , she reads archival materials to find traces of patients families 
  inside the asylum through physicians case notes , letters to and from asylum doctors , 
 patients letters , visitors logbooks , committal papers and maintenance payments .
second , 
 she examines how various emotions , between patients and families in relation to confinement , 
 are performed in various correspondences .
answering roy porter s call for evidence of patients 
 experience , to rewrite medical history  from below 
   has attended to the patient s voice in archival materials .
this approach is 
 exemplified in allan beveridge s analyses of patients letters written from various british 
 and scottish asylums in the late nineteenth century . 
 
such analyses valorise patients authentic perspectives which are frequently found 
 to be oppositional to the asylum regime ; and as such , are seemingly unmediated by the 
 medical or psychiatric gaze that 
constructs asylum patients in particular ways . 
  in patients letters that have been retained in asylum archives , or not sent to 
 addressees for whatever reason
, beveridge s patients were found to object to wrongful 
 confinement , deception by relatives , brutality from attendants , coarseness of other 
 patients , and overcrowding in the asylum .
an epistemological dilemma of historical asylum 
 scholarship in this porter - tradition is the selection of sometimes quaint , deluded or florid 
 bits from many patients letters , which are clumped together as empirical evidence of 
 general themes reflecting real patients agency or states of mind .
beveridge and his 
 collaborators have responded to the apparent loss of contexts for patients statements in 
 this thematic clumping with a raft of descriptive , historical case studies of individual 
 inmates of various asylums . 
 
these detailed case studies feature real patients , usually certified with mania , who 
 have distinguished themselves as prolific producers of letters , poems , published articles 
 and drawings that have survived in the archives .
this paper moves along these various scholarly paths , but with some theoretical and 
 methodological differences inspired by the writing of several foucauldian scholars .
the 
 study is anchored to one white british south african man who became mentally ill , and his 
 settler family , as an illness narrative that is told from multiple perspectives .
this is not 
 a case study of the beveridge ilk , but following the theoretical ideas of david armstrong , 
 it is a carefully contextualised analysis of a 
patient as a  subject , which seeks to 
 examine particular archival scenes of his construction and reconstruction within mental 
 health care in south africa between 1908 and 1911 . 
  for foucault
, narratives are understood through the forces of discourse , power and 
 history , 
  rather than an articulation of an authentic voice of experience that we have ready 
 access to .
the illness narrative concerns harry walter wilbraham , who , after a long struggle 
 with headaches and worsening seizures , was medically boarded from his position as postmaster 
 in idutywa , in the cape of good hope colony in south africa , with  a permanent disease of 
 the brain and was committed to the grahamstown asylum in 1910 , where he died the following 
 year , aged 40 years .
harry was my great - grandfather , and this familiarity has facilitated an 
 opportunity to reflect on a shrouded aspect of my own family history .
thus , this scholarly 
 paper pulls between two meanings and methods of  genealogy in reconstructing patient and 
 practitioner views , while also addressing involvement of family members in mental health 
 care and the stigma of mental illness .
foucauldian genealogy involves the writing of a critical history which explores the 
 processes , procedures and conditions by which truth and knowledge are produced through the 
 discursive regimes of the era . 
 
this interrogatory lens is  problem - based ; and in this study , this lens produces 
 two interwoven biographical accounts .
the first examines the construction of harry s 
 patient - hood , as a 
the second 
 examines how a settler family manages the calamity of losing a partner , father and 
 breadwinner , and the uncertainty and silences around mental illness , against a context of 
 domestic and colonial life , c.18881918 . for ann stoler ,
genealogies of the 
 intimate involve tracking how relations grounded in sex , sentiment , close association with 
 bodies , the innermost and personal , child bearing and rearing , are performed in formal 
 records and informal traces of how a household or  home works . 
 
this historical tracking involves sifting through sprawling archival documents and 
 narrative materials about a family , about a family member s illness , looking for significant 
 and accidental details that connect , reiterate , interrupt , challenge or destabilise in 
 mapping how meaning was , is and might be made in daily life . 
 
this genealogical study moves among the scattered official traces of harry s life 
 and illness in an archive  the physician s reports , admission records , asylum case notes , 
 pension and estate documents , and a letter he wrote to his mother from the asylum .
popular genealogy involves tracing ancestors and heritage to produce a family tree 
  and , by extension , 
family narratives as the auto / biographical stories we tell and 
 are told about our own families
. 
  these include formal intergenerational testimonies and heirlooms , such as diaries , 
 letters , family photograph albums or inherited furniture ; and the regaled reminiscences 
 about the remarkable and the mundane minutiae of family living  the childhood scrapes , the 
 hard times , the holiday at the sea , the courtship yarn .
family narratives are not always 
 stories of closeness , safety and stability with neat beginnings and endings . 
 
complicated family narratives of trauma or illness , tough choices , secrets , 
 disappointments , disputes , desertion and death trouble us , if not within our own histories , 
 then permeating our awareness through pervasive representations of these experiences in 
 other families . 
  this is where this genealogical paper swerves off the established paths of 
 scholarship and biographies on families and colonial lunatic asylums . because harry was my 
 great - grandfather , i have access to further layers of his construction through the family 
 stories , secrets and silences about his illness and death ; and i want to incorporate these 
 memory traces of experiences and feelings as inaccessibly fractured , contested and 
 irresolutely entangled in the present . 
 
these traces outside formal archives include a handwritten letter , family 
 photographs , a budget - diary kept by a young widow , and interviews with harry s living 
 grandsons , my father and my uncle .
the contributions to historians of these foucauldian ways of gathering and reading source 
 materials are various . against calls for more first - hand personal narratives in histories of 
 mental illness , 
 
this case - study provides a microcosmic view of one patient s and one settler 
 family s experiences within the discursive practices of a particular mental health care 
 system and colonial society .
the intimate arrangements of family life , the stuff of 
 family - storytelling and memoir , are powerfully drawn into historiographical scholarship that 
 engages with how the dynamics of family support and withdrawal , and the stigma of mental 
 illness resonate inter - generationally .
the methodology of interweaving archival sources 
 highlights gaps and speculations within primary materials , and contradictions between them , 
 which in turn reproduce the contingency , multiplicity , fragmentariness , silencing and 
 unknowability of mental illness .
modern medicine s clinical gaze works within a restitution 
 narrative , where we have come to expect that diagnosis leads to appropriate treatment and 
 cure , with our lives and selves restored to go on as before . 
 
but , as maria tamboukou , a foucauldian scholar of genealogical life - writing , has 
 asked : what if such narrative sequence and continuity is not possible ? 
  thus , this study contributes a meaning - making process that implicates many 
 historically and discursively located protagonists and storytellers ( including the author ) , 
 and a life - story that is not easily resolved , rendered or represented .
the argument about harry s repeated reconstruction as a mentally ill patient / subject 
 proceeds below in five parts that examine different frames of his patient - hood and 
 unfolding , inter - textual sets of materials as evidence .
 case is situated within historiographical scholarship about british colonial 
 asylums and psychiatric care in the cape of good hope colony in south africa in the late 
 nineteenth century .
second , formal state archival sources and family - storytelling are 
 deployed to produce a biographical account of his life , and the intimate familial 
 arrangements around him .
third , various physicians reports are used to account for harry s condition , 
 leading up to his medical boarding , pensioning and committal .
fourth , a first - hand account 
 by harry of his own illness is examined .
this took the form of a letter he wrote from the 
 grahamstown asylum to his mother . and
fifth , harry s asylum case - notes and archived estate 
 papers are read to reconstruct his denouement and death .
one of the more political or wide - angled contexts for the narrative of harry s illness from 
 1908 and subsequent confinement in the grahamstown asylum in 191011 might be tracked 
 through south african historical scholarship on the escalation of colonial asylums in the 
 cape of good hope colony during the nineteenth century .
the early institutions  for example 
 the old somerset hospital and the robben island lunatic asylum in cape town , established in 
 1818 and 1846 respectively  were fairly undifferentiated in their incarceration of lepers , 
 the chronically sick , paupers and the insane . 
 
however , colonial expansion , and the need for specialist facilities to contain the 
  mad , soon led to the proliferation of asylums . 
 
the eastern cape frontier was forged at the outer geographical limits of the cape of 
 good hope colony through contact between ( white ) british settlers who were funnelled into 
 the region in waves from 1820 , as professionals , trades - people and farmers , alongside and 
 displacing indigenous communities of ( black ) isixhosa - speaking people . 
 
the grahamstown asylum was opened in 1875 , using a disused british military barracks 
 known as fort england , and quickly became overcrowded , and stretched in terms of new 
 admissions and transfers .
for example , in 1909 , the year preceding harry s committal , there 
 was a daily average number of resident inmates in the grahamstown asylum of 396 , made up of 
 267 men and 129 women ; 
  and the total number of cases under care during this year was 498 . 
  by 1908 , the grahamstown asylum was exclusively reserved for the 
european  ( white ) insane , 
 following the establishment within a 150  mile radius of the port alfred asylum for the 
 mentally handicapped and chronically infirm of all races and the fort beaufort asylum for 
 the black insane . 
 
thus , the majority of cases transferred from the grahamstown asylum in 1909 were 
 categorised as  coloured   for example , forty - seven out of fifty - four cases 
 transferred . 
 
the colonial policy of maintaining separate , racially segregated institutions for 
 white and black patients was gradually phased out for practical reasons of convenience  for 
 example , it was difficult to transfer patients to their designated asylum , miles from their 
 homes , and black patients provided manual labour in asylums farms and laundries  but 
 patients within asylums remained racially segregated until the end of the apartheid era in 
 the 1990s . 
  with the settlement of the union of south africa in 1910 , british colonial authority 
 over civic services including hospitals and asylums shifted from the cape of good hope 
 colony towards a centralised legislative system , with its headquarters in pretoria , further 
 away .
recurrent themes in the south african asylum literature suggest that these political 
 rearrangements would have infused harry s illness experience , diagnoses , medical boarding , 
 committal and psychiatric care as a white settler man and civil servant in the cape of good 
 hope colony , between the years of 1908 and 1911 .
first , harry would undoubtedly have been 
 afforded privileged asylum space , 
  and would have been assured of a relatively smooth passage through the sticky 
 processes of his medical boarding from his postmaster position , and of the regulatory 
 legalisation of asylum committal through medical , magisterial and colonial authorities . 
  that there existed substantial archival traces of his 
case is noteworthy here , 
 within a colonial apparatus that governed from a distance via pervasive official chains of 
 paper . 
  against an assertion that case records and archived documents were less readily kept 
 for black patients ,
an overwhelming amount of statistical data was amassed on cases in increasingly finely 
 calibrated categories , including race , sex , occupation , marital status , diagnosis , aetiology 
 of illness , and so on . 
 
there were also thicker archival trails for mentally ill patients who could speak 
 english , who had money / assets or owned and sold property , who were the subjects of legal 
 scrutiny , or who were paying inmates of asylums and whose families were pursued for 
 maintenance payments . 
 
fragmentariness of archival traces was produced through transfers and readmissions 
 of patients , and through erratic archivisation after 1910 ( union of south africa ) , when many 
 asylum records were lost or destroyed . 
 
secondly , there were substantial developments in the professionalisation of psychiatry and 
 diagnostic knowledge about psychopathology in the period 18181930 , 
  although asylums during this time were largely holding institutions providing secure 
 and safe custody for those with severe mental illness , brain disease and mental handicap who 
 were unable to care for themselves . 
 
sally swartz s scholarship has tracked the increasingly sophisticated classificatory 
 activity in and through the work of british colonial asylums in south africa , with the 
 emergence , for example , of gpi in the late nineteenth century and psychotic personality 
 disorders in the early twentieth century . 
 
thus , harry would have received specialised medical attention and clinical opinion 
 on his condition , discursively contingent to this era .
genealogies of the british - trained 
 doctors of the insane , who were imported into the cape of good hope colony , have explored 
 their  styles or  schools of asylum doctoring expertise , noting their developing interest 
 in neurology , with advanced neurosyphilis as a powerful aetiological factor in diagnoses of 
 mental illness prior to the development and application of penicillin antibiotic treatment 
 for venereal syphilis . 
 
one of harry s consultant nerve - doctors and brain surgeons in cape town in 1909 , 
 prior to his committal in the grahamstown asylum , was one dr hugh smith , who was reported to 
 have been a student of dr john hughlings jackson , the eminent british neurologist , at the 
 london hospital . 
 
however , this professional specialisation and clinical practice was inevitably 
 inscribed with the discriminatory class - based , racialised and gendered norms of 
 understandings of pathology of the colonial era , and prone to shifting aetiologies and 
 diagnoses . 
 
these developments governed what was findable , knowable and tellable about harry s 
 condition , then and now .
south african asylum historians have suggested that mental illness ( gpi in particular ) was 
 on the rise in south africa in the period 188090 because of the high incidence of acquired 
 or venereal syphilis infection , 
  but it is hard to establish firm causal associations with gpi admissions and deaths 
 because of erratic numbers . 
 
gpi appeared in british psychiatry from the 1840s onwards , and was associated with 
 the tertiary and fatal phase of neurosyphilis , but was also initially related to 
the 
 destructive influences of alcohol , tobacco and sex. 
  in 1909 , five white men diagnosed with gpi were admitted to the grahamstown 
 asylum , 
  and two white men and one woman were reported to have venereal syphilis . 
 
karen jochelson s epidemiological history of syphilis in south africa found that 
 although congenital forms of syphilis were endemic in indigenous populations , venereal or 
 sexually transmitted syphilis was introduced to south africa by european settlers , sailors 
 and soldiers . 
  from the mid - nineteenth century , venereal syphilitic disease was seen as the 
  settler scourge , located initially around ports and garrison towns where migrancy and 
 prostitution thrived , and then moved inland with the army during the south african 
 ( anglo - boer ) war and migration towards new diamond and gold - mining towns . 

harry walter wilbraham was born in 1871 in england , the fourth child of george and mary 
 wilbraham .
his father george was a printer compositor , and the wilbraham household  
 including two older sisters ( fanny and jane ) , an older brother ( alfred ) , and a boarder who 
 became like a brother to alfred and harry ( james morrison )  was situated at 14 tresco road , 
 camberwell , surrey . 
 
the circumstances of harry s arrival in the eastern cape frontier in south africa 
 are conjectural and somewhat heroic in family - storytelling about him . 
 
he was sent by his fretful parents by settler ship to cape town to find a sister who 
 had run away ; but when he arrived in cape town , the sister had married following a shipboard 
 romance and sailed with her new husband for australia . as the family story goes , harry was 
 17 years old in 1888 , and he  trousered  ( or kept ) the money he had been given for his and 
 his sister s return sea - journey to england , and decided to stay and make a go of it in the 
 cape of good hope colony . 
 
official 
 archival records find him gainfully employed by the cape of good hope colony government as 
 an assistant postmaster from 1894 in various towns in the eastern cape frontier ( kokstad , 
 port elizabeth , uitenhage , mthatha ) , before being appointed as postmaster in idutywa , now 
 known as dutywa , in1906 . 
 

copyright reserved , wilbraham family 
 archive . reproduced with kind permission . a postmaster s work during this era of the south african or anglo - boer war ( 18991902 )
is 
 understood to entail postal administration and delivery , and telegraphy , maintaining 
 capillaries of communication between officials , individuals and families in far - flung 
 peripheries and their colonial centres .
as such , postal work served as a pivotal technology 
 of effective colonial governance , and an epistolary distribution of affect and sentiment , 
 what ann stoler has called  the colonial heart. 
  the speed of official correspondence about harry s early pensioning was noteworthy , 
 given that letters moved by horse , cart and coaster - ship between dutywa , port alfred , port 
 elizabeth and cape town , arriving in less than five days . 
 
thus , a postmaster s position is read here as requiring responsibility and grit in 
 the portability of its civic and political duties , while providing considerable social 
 footing within the everyday habitus of colonial settler communities . 
  the loss of this position and work due to his physical infirmity and mental illness 
 is reflected later on by his wife , in the stigma and embarrassment of his increasingly 
 bizarre and deluded public behaviour , and by himself , in a letter to his mother from the 
 grahamstown asylum ,
harry met jessie may hall in 1901 in mthatha , and they were married in 1902 , settling in 
 dutywa , where harry was assistant postmaster at the time .
their only child , a son , my 
 grandfather , harry oswald wilbraham , known as chick , howie or oswald , was born in 1903 . 

jessie may , known as maysie , was born in 1882 in port elizabeth ; an only child of 
 working - class eastern cape settlers . her father was a stonemason who built lighthouses along 
 the eastern cape coast , and her mother operated an ox - cart haulage business between frontier 
 towns .
maysie was schooled in butterworth , and in 1895 , aged 14 years , enrolled at the 
 grahamstown teachers training college to study for a licentiate diploma in music . 
 
three years later in 1898 , her first appointment as a qualified music teacher was at 
 st margaret s school for girls in mthatha ; and it was this profession as a working woman  
 teaching the pianoforte  that was the livelihood , creativity and passionate 
 self - description 
  that sustained her when adversities arrived . 

chick , aged 5 years ) and 
 jessie may wilbraham ( maysie ) , c.1908 .
chick , aged 5 years ) and 
 jessie may wilbraham ( maysie ) , c.1908 .
pensioned from his postmaster position in december 1909 , was committed to the 
 grahamstown asylum in march 1910 with a  disease of the brain , and died there in october 
 1911 , aged 40 years . 
 
harry was awarded a civil service and widows pension of   70 per annum , which was 
 paid from the outset to his wife on grounds of his disability .
maysie continued to live and 
 give private piano lessons in dutywa until 1918 , and subsequently in mthatha , where she 
 lived in the house that had been built by her parents for almost 60 years .
the family stories that are retold about maysie celebrate her independence , her 
 eccentricity and her doughty resilience through almost 70 years of widowhood when means were 
 tight . 
 
she lived alone with her young son and augmented harry s pension by taking in 
 lodgers and with income she earned as a piano teacher and the church organist .
income as postmaster was recorded as   268 per annum , including salary , bonus and 
 overtime . 
 
heavy expenses of harry s illness 
 and medical treatments 
  prior to his committal in the grahamstown asylum , while using up their savings and 
 surviving on the reduced household income of his pension of   70 per annum .
there is mention 
 in the certification of insanity and committal documents issued from the resident 
 magistrate s office in dutywa , of fees that would be deducted from this pension for harry s 
 maintenance in the asylum . 
 
however , there is no surviving official or familial record that harry was a paying 
 inmate in the grahamstown asylum ; or that these fees were formally appealed against or 
 waived on grounds of the family s penury or his status as a former civil servant of the 
 colonial government . 
 
harry was in possession of a post office savings bank book when he was 
 committed , 
  and the meagre amount of this investment was paid to maysie according to the terms 
 of his will in 1913 . 
 
maysie balanced every penny she spent against her monthly and annual incomes in a 
 small budgetary notebook that remained in the family s possession amongst her photograph 
 albums ; and she was known to be thrifty and frugal . she kept a sharp eye out for bargains at 
 the local second - hand shop , and heated her bathwater in dozens of brown glass sherry bottles 
 lined up in the sun .
she was also notoriously preoccupied with music , and undomesticated ; 
 and whether it was due to this preoccupation , or penury , mealtimes frequently produced 
 inadvertent surprises , such as weevils in your porridge and sour milk in your tea .
maysie and harry s son , chick , became a magistrate in the transkei region , 
  married and had two sons ; and maysie was adored by her grandsons , my father and my 
 uncle , who spent considerable amounts of their boyhood growing up in her company .
they 
 recall a head and shoulders photograph of harry that hung above her bed in her mthatha home , 
 and that if really pressed , she would say that harry had always had sharp wits about him . 
 beyond this ,
stories about harry are perhaps the kind that families 
 hold back , or carefully shroud , due to the uncertainty and stigma of mental illness .
my 
 father and my uncle recall their father , chick , saying that harry got headaches and beat him 
 as a child for making a noise .
explains harry s condition and death , 
 still told today with various plot embellishments , involves reference to an accident in the 
 course of his postmaster duties in which he fell off his horse and injured his head , 
 precipitating a brain tumour . my archival research with patients case files from the 
 grahamstown asylum uncovered some unexpected twists and darker corners in his illness 
 narrative .
harry s troubled body moved into plane of sight in 1908 , with headaches , for which he was 
 treated by dr chas armstrong lumley , a cambridge - trained british medical doctor stationed in 
 grahamstown , approximately 250  km ( 155  miles ) from harry s home in dutywa . 
  later in 1908 and early 1909 , these headaches progressively evolved into periodic 
 seizures resembling epileptic fits , after which harry was left for some days with visual 
 disturbances and without speech or use of his limbs .
dr lumley s various letters and 
 clinical reports concerning his referral of harry , in june 1909 , to various medical 
 colleagues in cape town who had specialised clinical interests in
however , dr wood s , dr richardson s and dr smith s extensive reports , including a 
 technically detailed surgical account of harry s brain operation on the 22 june 1909 , as 
 report - backs to dr lumley in grahamstown , have survived within harry s asylum 
 case - notes . 
 
it is clear from the cape town doctors five reports , spanning a two - month spell 
 from 16 june to 11 august 1909 , that harry and his wife maysie were in cape town during this 
 time of examination , hospitalisation , surgery and recuperation ; and that there was ongoing 
 debate in the to and fro correspondence between the doctors concerning his diagnosis and 
 prognosis .
it appears from this correspondence that lumley s initial diagnosis involved a 
 brain tumour  a tumour precipitated by the head injury in the horse accident , which was 
 established to have occurred in 1897 , 11 years prior to the onset of the headaches and fits 
  and optical neuritis .
however , lumley suspected syphilitic disease in the neurological 
 reactivity , and had been medicating harry with an iodide and mercury tincture to treat 
 syphilis , prior to the cape town referral .
lumley s hypotheses were referred to the cape town doctors for testing ; and they ruled some 
 out and mooted others , but dr richardson regretted  that the case was not sufficiently clear 
 to come to definite conclusions. 
  no evidence of optical neuritis was found ; but the pupils of his eyes were 
 irregularly shaped and not responsive to light .
this was taken as a symptom of cerebral 
 vascular compression , or of neurosyphilis 
the brain 
 surgery revealed no tumour or cyst in the left frontal lobe , but found suspicious lesions on 
 cortical vessels , thought to have been caused by thrombosis , jacksonian epileptic seizures 
 and/or tertiary syphilitic disease .
the intermittent symptoms of physical paralysis , 
 diagnosed as gpi , also causally associated with neurosyphilis , were thought to be at an 
 early , indeterminate stage .
he wrote that  mr wilbraham denies syphilis but of course in these cases one never allows a 
 negative history of this disease to affect one s diagnosis or treatment ; and later on , that 
  it would be interesting to know if the child [ chick ] shows any signs of hereditary 
 mischief. 
  it was hoped that the decompressive brain surgery would relieve intracranial 
 vascular tension to extinguish symptoms , and it was recommended that the iodide and mercury 
 treatment be continued  in the event that there is a syphilitic origin in the case. 
  however , remission did not materialise for harry .
the periodic seizures resumed and 
 the left frontal lobe brain damage resulted in spells of aphasia , physical weakness and 
 paralysis , and increasingly , confused and delusional behaviour .
his medical boarding and 
 pensioning on grounds of  physical infirmity and  a permanent disease of the brain was 
 applied for in november 1909 , effective from december 1909 . 
 

figure  3:chick wilbraham ( aged 11 years ) and maysie wilbraham , c.1914 . 

i move now to another archival scene in harry s illness narrative : the letter harry wrote 
 to his mother ( in england ) from the grahamstown asylum on the 23 may 1910 , two months after 
 his committal on 24 march 1910 . 
  my reasons for including this letter as a first - hand account of mental 
 deterioration , in its entirety , are various .
its form and contents resist , and augment , the 
 ways in which patients letters have hitherto been represented in various historical 
 writings about colonial asylums as descriptive themes evidenced by decontextualised snippets 
 from many patients letters . against this writing ,
harry s letter offers a sustained 
 opportunity to engage with his particular writing , in context , in a more theoretically 
 interpretive way via a / his strategy of suture  in both narrative and lacanian 
 psychoanalytic senses of this term .
it is read here as an attempt , performed for the 
 audience of a beloved and distant mother , to stitch together a coherent narrative of the 
 chaotic illness which has unmade his self , his family and his life ; 
  and to stitch himself back into the relations of intimacy , affect and sentiment with 
 those he loved and had lost . 
  harry and maysie s quest for diagnosis and effective treatment in cape town has been 
 explored medically above .
however , i point here to harry s own uses of a clinical gaze on 
 his seizures , symptoms and choices , and of everyday domestic details and emotions , in this 
 epistolary performance of suture .
the letter was written on both sides of a torn - off half - sheet of thin gauge writing paper . 

the appearance of a letter , and the use of a letter as a form of suture , is perhaps 
 unsurprising in harry s situation .
he was literally a man of letters , of beautiful 
 copperplate handwriting , who , as a postmaster , had made his livelihood within the 
his mental and physical state was disordered at the time of this 
 retrospective writing about his illness , and the letter mimics this desperate scrambling for 
 order and sensibility with words omitted , illegible , scratched out , and added as marginalia . 

the letter was pinned to the cape town nerve - doctors reports , and archived in a different 
 location to the patients casebook , a large leather - bound book in which harry s ( and other 
 patients ) asylum admission examination notes and weekly or monthly updates by the asylum s 
 medical superintendent were handwritten . 
 
the 
 superintendent s case - note dated 19 may 1910 figured harry as follows :  remains very 
 confused  wanders about picking up stones as diamonds , etc . writes to his mother as queen 
 mary and signs himself as king edward wilbraham. 
  this case - note , and that harry s letter appears in the archived folder with other reports 
 pertaining to his case , indicates that the letter was kept as clinical evidence of his 
 confusion and delusions , and was not posted to his mother .
patients letters from colonial 
 asylums were read and vetted by asylum staff , and were usually sent to addressees as 
 communication strategies to maintain familial ties with both inmates and doctors . 
 
queen mary , idutywa. this is written in pencil , in a different 
 handwriting , in the margin ; and it is not clear who this referred to . it might have been 
 addressing his mother , mary , who lived in england and the asylum may not have known her 
 address ; or his wife and next - of - kin , jessie may , who lived in dutywa and to whom harry 
 refers in his letter as  maysie and as  queen june may. furthermore , contradictory 
 archival sources suggest that harry s mother died in june 1909 , but it is unclear whether 
 harry ( or maysie ) knew of her death or not . 
 
the letter follows , with some clarifications in square brackets [ thus ] and harry s 
 own erasures represented .
i have not seen you for 22 years , and you can not come to the asylum .
i can not go to see you and my wife if dr 
 c. a. lumley takes me out of the asylum .
my wife has not written to me for two months , but i 
 love my queen june may too much and my mother too .
they are awful doctors if you i wrote ten letters . fred and clare 
 lost two girls and the boy 20 years they are very sorry . after the illness for 3 years i got 
 useless for the telegraph area .
we come to idutywa oswald had measles very mild , may had 
 tonsilis [ sic ] , we was [ illegible ] the house [ in margin : feb 5 ] , and i finish up the an 
 awful attack on the left on my head and in [ illegible ] on the right side on head
[ illegible ] the night but 10/30  pm may sent to the dr , and i was too ill , i can not talk 
 again for 8 days .
we waited for 9 trams and the 10 trams was the right one , 
 tamboers kloof .
another man shaved on my head on sunday morning and doctor richardson pencil 
 and over my head .
the operation on my head at 10.30 am on tuesday next and it   [ hours ] to open my head .
maysie came to see on thurs but i good not talk 
 and she came on sunday and had a nice dinner .
i was a month * [ in the margin : * in the 
 asylum ] want to see my girlie . in 3 weeks
dr r. had a consultation on my head and 
 [ illegible ] dr and surgeons talked my head .
king edward william harry walter wilbraham harry s letter finds himself in the grahamstown asylum , and isolated from the affective 
 relationships that had sustained his sense of himself in the world .
in the first instance , 
 this is separation from his wife ( maysie ) and young son ( oswald ) ; but also from his mother 
 ( in england ) , his siblings and their families ( in australia and england ) , and fred , clare , 
 mrs mahan and mrs morrison . 
 
this alludes to the dispersed fragmentation of kin within an era of imperial 
 colonisation , where people moved around within and between far - flung colonial sites . 
 
harry s writing reasserts a feeling - connection with these significant , distant 
 others , replacing himself within idealised intimate arrangements and familial self - object 
 relations to establish continuity of selfhood . 
 
the warding off of chaos is most notable in his letter in the ways that he attaches 
 the traumatic memories of his illness episodes to domestic minutiae involving his wife and 
 son .
thus , his first seizure on 3  december 1908 was followed by a long christmas holiday at 
 the coast .
his second seizure on 5 february 1909 coincided with maysie s tonsillitis and 
 oswald s measles .
similarly , 
 the 1200  km ( 735  mile ) journey to cape town by coaster - ship , the briton , is represented as a 
 shared familial experience of maysie s seasickness , trying to understand tram transport in a 
 strange city , and dinners during hospital visits .
i have 
 been unable to establish whether maysie did write to or visit him in the asylum before his 
 death the following year ; but i suspect that she did not .
i 
 can not go and see you and my wife  and that his letter is addressed to his mother , and not 
 to maysie directly , are taken as clues to something or someone unfathomably altered or lost . 

as harry s letter suggests , this had been a long , trying and perplexing illness , which had 
 inevitably disrupted their lives , used up resources , and worn down those around him . 

furthermore , maysie s statement on his committal to the asylum on the 24 march 1910 
 indicates she had accompanied him to this point , but that his changed behaviour had become 
 increasingly hard to handle , and the stigma of his condition seemed to be formalised through 
 diagnosis and institutionalisation .
childish 
 and irresponsible conduct generally ,  foolish petty thefts ( stealing plants from their 
 neighbour s garden ) , and his  silly boasting ( pretending to be a church minister ) . 
 
she had lost the familiar husband she loved and relied on ; and , in 
 family - storytelling about harry s illness and her subsequent widowhood , she did not seem to 
 want to say very much about this .
whether maysie  dumped harry in the asylum in order to focus on her responsibilities as 
 full - time breadwinner to support herself and her son  the household - economics in early 
 capitalism hypothesis forwarded by andrew scull 
  and david wright 
   is perhaps imaginable and probable , but unknowable .
but grahamstown was not easily 
 commutable from dutywa , c. 1910 , particularly when resources of money and 
 time were tight .
the cape town quest for medical answers had introduced the tangled intimate 
 matter of syphilis , and the bleak indecipherability of harry s prognosis .
one of the 
 nerve - doctors in cape town , dr richardson s report notes :  i have explained to the wife the 
 state of affairs and she seems to be reconciled. 
  it is not clear what this  state of affairs was ; nor what maysie was  reconciled 
 to .
was she told of the syphilis , and the implications of this for herself and her son ?
how 
 did this remake or unravel intimacy between harry and maysie ? these are , of course , my own 
 contemporary questions refracted through the lens of one sexually transmitted epidemic 
 ( hiv / aids ) onto another ( syphilis ) .
certainly , nineteenth - century colonial asylums were 
 providing custodial care for patients committed with gpi and other neurological disorders 
 said to be due to tertiary syphilitic disease . 
 
these patients were represented in various relations with their spouses  for 
 example , committal to the asylum as a refuge or escape from a sexually abusive husband , 
  or a wife s appeal for her husband s release from an asylum without knowledge of his 
 syphilis and gonorrhoea . 
 
mark finnane has suggested that the asylum had physical and symbolic value in 
  separating the two parties in a domestic war in a rapidly changing social world . 
 
the state of affairs by dr 
 richardson ; but it is on record that he denied the possibility of syphilis during the 
 pre - surgical clinical examination . 
  understandably , he does not refer to it in his letter to his mother , where his 
 chaotic illness experience is carefully sutured to seizure - episodes as  attacks  beyond his 
 control , comprehension or coping , and lists of bewildering and debilitating symptoms .
arthur 
 frank has argued that chaos narratives of illness are characterised by a rush of disjointed 
 events that overwhelm reflective distance and the  voice ( or self ) that puts a coherent 
 story together . 
 
this chaos is poignantly caught in the hurried form of harry s letter , scribbled 
 quickly lest his mind escape again , and is managed through his docile surrender to the 
 medical gaze .
he recalls 
 dr lumley s and dr richardson s names and the localities of their practices , and the terms , 
 choices and procedures they prescribed .
he  waits for another attack and  goes to cape 
 town as advised .
he describes the various medical technologies of examination of his head  
 shaving it , pencilling marks for the surgical operation , cutting it open and surgeons 
 talking about it .
patient , constituted and wholly infused within 
 medicalised discourse as a subject , 
  shored up by these certainties and reassurances , but denied restitution .
the last archival scene incorporates writings about harry as case 3414 in 
 a patients casebook of the grahamstown asylum where he was committed on 24 march 1910 , and 
 died on 23 october 2011 . 
 
harry was noted on admission as bearing a large scar on his forehead (  left frontal 
 region ) , the mark of his brain surgery and prior patient - hood .
he was immediately 
 recognised as insane in the admission notes by the medical superintendent , displaying the 
 mental traces ( delusional ideas about where or who he was , effusive speech and flight of 
 ideas , impaired recent memory , inappropriate laughter ) and the embodiments of insanity 
 ( dilated pupils , a 
fatuous facial expression , jerky legs , slurred speech and tremor of the 
 tongue and lips  like that of gpi ) .
he reportedly settled down fairly quickly into the 
 daily routines of the asylum , eating and sleeping well ; but was  of unsound mind as 
 demonstrated in his mental confusion , wandering about aimlessly , picking up stones , 
 following the attendants  like a child , talking about being a doctor , and he was sometimes 
  morbidly exalted. this peaceable being for harry was violently ruptured by intermittent 
 seizures , also called  convulsions and  epileptic - like fits , where his  eyes rolled back 
 and to the left , which gradually increased in frequency and severity , wearing away his 
 ability to recover his speech and mobility .
incoherent ; as issuing  weird guttural noises ; as violent towards other 
 patients ( e.g.  joins in any little struggle and kicks anyone who is down ) ; as  restless 
 and quite demented ; and as having to be restrained in the padded room . as distressing as harry s denouement into madness and chaos is to read , it was 
 disconcerting to find that the case notes shrunk in detail and frequency as his mental and 
 physical condition deteriorated .
thus from cryptic entries detailing dementia and grimacing 
 on 24 february 1911 , and convulsions and restraint on 30 may 1911 , the final entry was 
 written , in a different handwriting , on the 23 october 1911 , as follows : the patient has 
 been going downhill steadily for the last two months , having recurring bouts of convulsive 
 seizures almost daily .
he 
 died today . if a death certificate was issued for harry by the medical superintendent from the 
 grahamstown asylum at the time of his death , a copy of this document specifying the cause of 
 death was not archived or has been lost .
a formal death notice , accompanied by harry s last 
 will was filed with the magistrate in dutywa by his widow , maysie , more than eighteen months 
 after his death , on 19 june 1913 . 
  in terms of this official correspondence with the master of the supreme court of the 
 union of south africa , and as set out in harry s will , the full amount of harry s moveable 
 property ,   2.4.3 ( two pounds , four shillings and threepence ) in the post office savings 
 bank , was paid to maysie on the 7  august 1913 .
it was formally stated in this correspondence 
 that maysie , as the widow and applicant , had  discharged the funeral expenses ; although no 
 details were given about when and where harry was buried . in keeping with the silences 
 maysie maintained about harry s illness and death
, there is no surviving wilbraham - family 
 record or account of his funeral .
his grave , if this was indeed marked by an engraved 
 gravestone , has not been traced in the municipal or church cemeteries of grahamstown , dutywa 
 or mthatha .
this paper has mapped the intimate arrangements of familiarity through one family s 
 management of the calamity and chaos , the stigma and silence , of mental illness .
harry 
 emerged through this as a patient and a subject , constituted within the medical gaze of late 
 nineteenth- and early twentieth - century psychiatry , but ultimately as a shadowy figure .
a 
 genealogical approach holds that archival and narrative materials do not capture  the whole 
 truth of experience of family living , debilitating illness and loss , or a self s 
 resilience ; but construct versions of it as partial truths or truth claims . 
 
each account  remakes history and  apprehends its subjects , harry or maysie or 
 chick , with the subjective lenses and discursive tools of its specific milieu and location . 

the critical task of representation is not to settle on one or the truth , 
 but to map how the possibilities within singular and different truthful stories construct , 
 jostle with , fracture and resist what is taken for granted about families and selves .
this writing of the  particular , of the intimacies of illness and intricacies of death 
 among the minutiae of a family s lives , is cast against the sweeping generalities of claims 
 about conditions or themes in extant colonial lunatic asylum literature . beyond the 
 historical description of carefully situated micro - practices ,
however , this paper has 
 explored how a particular mental illness narrative is complexly entangled in an ongoing 
 process of family storytelling , reminiscence and meaning - making in the present .
this 
 presented methodological opportunities to grapple with memory and stigma in a number of 
 ways .
along a similar trajectory , annette kuhn , reflecting on her method of  memory work 
 which used family photographs to unpack an estranged relationship with her mother , finds the 
 value of such singular case studies thus : for the stories they tell about a particular life , stories which will perhaps speak with a 
 peculiar urgency to readers in whom they elicit recognition of a shared history ; as a 
 contribution towards understanding how memory works culturally ; for what they offer more 
 generally to theories of culture and methods of cultural analysis ; and perhaps most 
 important of all , as a recipe , a toolkit , even an inspiration , for further works . 
  as any historical researcher knows , archives are  black boxes from which anything might or 
 might not emerge . 
 
the archive s gaps are part of the territory of partial truths ; as are the risks of 
 jumping to too - easy , too - speculative or too - critical conclusions without adequate immersion 
 in the available materials . 
 
this paper has espoused a foucauldian genealogical theoretical and methodological 
 position on illness , and has used multiple genres of archival and narrative material to 
 track this .
indeed , it was in the layering and interweaving of these materials , and in their 
 resonances between various pasts as episodic archival scenes , and the present , that the true 
 potential for resistance to the coherence of linear , unitary representations of selves , 
 illness and families arose . 
  where chaos narratives of mental illness might be thought of as running wildly amok , 
 outside discourse , as they resist the predictable coherence of clinical expertise , 
  harry s narrative was , instead , inexorably slow , ordinary and sad in its passage . 
 placing the archived bits and narrative fragments side by side allowed the silences to 
 emerge within and between stories , as further points of unfolding , becoming and 
 listening . 
 
given my familial relationship to harry , and the secrecy woven into family storytelling 
 about him , the engagement with the archival material was harrowing .
this emotional aspect is 
 eclipsed in the somewhat voyeuristic writing on families and colonial lunatic asylums that 
 unpack quirks , foibles and misperceptions of the more bizarre , nineteenth - century  cases in 
 an archive ; as is the ethical dimension of accountability for representations of these 
  cases with the later generations of their living relatives . 
 
the methodology pioneered in this paper made me aware of the number of hats i wore , 
 so to speak , on different occasions . as a historical researcher , a psychologist and family 
 memoirist ,
i was positioned as a broker of meanings between the asylum s texts and 
 contemporary familial audiences .
some of the darker corners of harry s illness narrative  
 his diagnosis with and treatment for syphilis ,
his journey to cape town for brain surgery , 
 his death in an asylum  were unknown to the extended family around me .
these unfamiliar 
 knowledges reverberated back and forth in contestations about  facts and in reminiscences 
 about maysie s stoicism and silence .
the appearance in the asylum case notes of tertiary syphilitic disease as an aetiological 
 factor in harry s neurological reactivity , and my disclosure of this status , was predictably 
 a skeleton rattling in a family cupboard .
where or who could he 
 have got syphilis from ? these kinds of defensiveness introduce different ways of reading the 
 contingency of psychiatric case - material in colonial lunatic asylum archives . on the one 
 hand ,
an against - the - grain argument for harry s misdiagnosis might be based on the 
 retrospective anecdotal evidence of the health and longevity of his non - symptomatic wife , 
 maysie , and son , chick .
similarly , harry s symptoms as presented within the extant case 
 records may be reassessed within the clinical gaze of twenty - first - century psychiatric 
 science to produce anomalous diagnoses and treatments .
but , on the other hand , extended 
 periods of harry s life - narrative are without traces in formal and familial records , 
 particularly accounts of his young manhood between the ages of 17 years , when he allegedly 
 arrived in south africa in 1888 , and 31 years , when he married in 1902 . 
 
within the true - romance marriage plot recycled in family storytelling , harry s prior 
 sexual desires and intimacies with other women , as inadvertent opportunities for contracting 
 syphilis , remain uneasily hidden and difficult to talk or write about .
the presence of 
 syphilis in white settler men did not mean , of course , that they were immoral , but rather 
 that their pre - marital sexual activity ( usually with prostitutes ) exposed them to the 
 sexually transmitted diseases of the day . 
  however , although venereal syphilis was initially a white settler problem in south 
 africa , the disease would increasingly become associated with 
poor whites in the early 
 twentieth century , and later on , almost exclusively with black people or africans . 
 
thus the shame and secrecy associated with syphilis was related to its sexual 
 transmission with black and  continental prostitutes , and fears about social hygiene and 
 contamination of racial purity caused by venereal diseases . 
 
the psychological discursive regime of our twenty - first century informs us that a narrative 
 grasp on the domestic dramas of our histories and presents , as genealogies of the intimate , 
 enable us to make sense of experience , to mark milestones and rites of passage , to learn 
 about obstacles and what values matter , and to shore up our sense of self or identity 
 through our belonging and footing in a family , community and socio - cultural milieu . 
 
we moderns have also come to expect that the telling of troubling stories  finding 
 out about and full disclosure of what really happened  is infused with powers of agency , 
 healing , closure and moving on . 
 
this has not been so in any simplistic sense of an outcome to this genealogical 
 study .
there is more at stake here than a lost grave , a sense of anguish and suffering 
 uncovered , and uncertainty about what to do next .
it is no accident that family memoirs are 
 prefaced or followed by extensive acknowledgements of the forbearance , assistance and 
 interest of family members , and apologies for any fictions that unwittingly or wittingly 
 have slipped in . 

 recent scholarship has explored the dynamics between families and colonial lunatic 
 asylums in the late nineteenth century , where families actively participated in the 
 processes of custodial care , committal , treatment and release of their relatives . 
 this 
 paper works in this historical field , but with some methodological and theoretical 
 differences . 
 the foucauldian study is anchored to a single case and family as an illness 
 narrative that moves cross - referentially between bureaucratic state archival material , 
 psychiatric case records , and intergenerational family - storytelling and family 
 photographs . 
 following headaches and seizures , harry walter wilbraham was medically 
 boarded from his position as postmaster in the cape of good hope colony of south africa 
 with a  permanent disease of the brain , and was committed to the grahamstown asylum in 
 1910 , where he died the following year , aged 40 years . 
 in contrast to writings about 
 colonial asylums that usually describe several patient cases and thematic patterns in 
 archival material over time and place , this study s genealogical lens examines one white 
 settler male patient s experiences within mental health care in south africa between 1908 
 and 1911 . 
 the construction of harry s  
 case interweaves archival sources and 
 reminiscences inside and outside the asylum , and places it within psychiatric discourse of 
 the time , and family dynamics in the years that followed . 
 thus , this case study maps the 
 constitution of  
 patient and  family in colonial life , c.18881918 , and 
 considers the calamity , uncertainty , stigma and silences of mental illness . 
Genealogies of the Intimate
Colonial Psychiatry and Asylums in South Africa
Familiar and Unfamiliar Narratives
Chaos Narratives of Rupture and Loss
A Patients Letter to Hold a Disintegrating Life and Self Together
Case 3414  a Denouement
Conclusions: Partial Truths and Archival Fragments