12/24/2023 0 Comments Gladys baker at rockhavenNumerous psychiatric hospitals in Poland are located in buildings that have been in constant use for many years and are often under conservator's protection. Overseas studies show that shortages of food caused the premature deaths of thousands of asylum patients during World War I, particularly in Britain and Germany, but the evidence indicates that average mortality rates at Australian asylums were not significantly affected during the War. While general paralysis of the insane was a major cause of death of male patients at Claremont, I suggest that ‘senile’ patients were the most vulnerable group. I show that this special path was the overarching factor determining the comparatively brief lives of Claremont patients. The distinctive economic, political and social conditions in Western Australia, a frontier state, framed the ‘special path’ of the historical development of mental health care in Western Australia. It examines the expectation of hospital life for the most vulnerable groups of patients, comparing mortality at Claremont with mortality at other institutions. This thesis explores the reasons for these deaths and how patients came to harm. The Case Books of Claremont Hospital for the Insane in Perth, Western Australia, record many cryptically explained patient deaths in the early twentieth century. Its significance is embedded in the insight it provides into medical and bureaucratic perceptions of rural life as an antidote to the social ills of industrial Melbourne, typical of the period. This study argues that the size of the Mont Park site was not an incidental feature but rather a defining characteristic. The Victorian Land Acts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century are then discussed in relation to eugenic ideas of the city as implicated both in the ‘decline’ of the Australian character and as the cause of mental illness. Mont Park is then compared to an inner metropolitan site, Royal Park Hospital for the Insane, in order to consider site activities and type of patient as factors that influenced the size of the respective sites. Annual Reports of the Lunacy Department, maps and images of the period are examined to establish the intention and function of the site. This paper examines the land of Mont Park Hospital to explore its meaning in the context of medical and bureaucratic beliefs of ‘working the land’ as a treatment for the ‘disordered mind’ and as solution to social problems. Although there have been a number of heritage reports of Mont Park, none have considered the site in terms of its size. The land was expansive and at 1289 acres was one of the largest sites for the treatment of mental illness in the western world. Mont Park Hospital for the Insane was established on former farmland on the fringes of the Melbourne suburbs in 1911.
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