Exhibiting Madness in Museums

Catharine Coleborne is Associate Professor in History in the History Programme, School of Social Sciences at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Her research interests include histories of families and institutions, mental health and oral histories, colonial psychiatry, ethnicity and gender. Her most recent book is Madness in the Family (2010). Dolly MacKinnon is a Senior Lecturer in the School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics, at The University of Queensland. A cultural historian whose publications span early modern history and the histories of psychiatry, Dolly has also co-edited Madness in Australia: Histories, Heritage and the Asylum (2003) with Catharine Coleborne.

Part I: Ways of Seeing and Remembering Psychiatry in the Museum 1. Seeing and Not Seeing Psychiatry. Dolly MacKinnon and Catharine Coleborne 2. Collecting Psychiatry’s Past: Collectors and Their Collections of Psychiatric Objects in Western Histories. Catharine Coleborne 3. Pictures of People, Pictures of Places: Photography and The Asylum. Barbara Brookes 4. The Ethics of Exhibiting Psychiatric Materials. Nurin Veis Part II: Material Culture and Memories of Madness 5. ‘Always Distinguishable From Outsiders’: Materialising Cultures of Clothing from Psychiatric Institutions. Bronwyn Labrum 6. Snatches of Music, Flickering Images, and the Smell of Leather: The Material Culture of Recreational Pastimes in Psychiatric Collections in Scotland and Australia. Dolly MacKinnon 7. ‘A Grave Injustice’: The Mental Hospital and Shifting Sites Of Memory. Nathan Flis and David Wright 8. Remembering Goodna: Stories from a Queensland Mental Hospital. Joanna Besley and Mark Finnane Part III: Bodies and Fragments 9. In the Interests of Science: Gathering Corpses from Lunatic Asylums. Helen MacDonald 10. The Anatomy Museum and Mental Illness: The Centrality of Informed Consent. D. Gareth Jones 11. The Material and Visual Culture of Patients in a Contemporary Psychiatric Secure Unit. Fiona R. Parrott