The Narrative of Ann Pratt: Life-Writing, Genre and Bureaucracy in a Postemancipation Scandal

'The next morning', Ann Pratt, a former patient in Kingston's Lunatic Asylum, wrote, 'Louise Cochran was again "tanked".' Describing her frantic and unsuccessful attempts to intervene on Cochran's behalf, Pratt continued:

Horrified and frightened at the terrible repetition of the scenes of yesterday, I rushed from the yard of the Lunatic Asylum into the yard of the Public Hospital, which is divided by a party wall. There I saw Dr. Keech under the arches of the buildings. I cried out Doctor! Doctor! being pursued. I ran up the stairs that lead to the Fever Wards, and grasped the railings, when I was seized by Antoinette, Julian, and a male labourer of the name of Thomas. Dr. Keech ordered them to take me back to the Asylum; they accordingly tore me from the hand rail of the stairs, and carried me back to Mrs. Ryan. … Immediately, on returning, I was confronted with Mrs. Ryan, who, with great indignation, ordered me to be 'tanked'. I was forthwith seized by Antoinette, Julian Burge, assisted by Lunatics. … I was stripped; my arms held behind me; my legs extended and forcibly separated from each other; I was plunged into the tank, and kept under the water till all resistance, on my part, ceased; their grasp was then relaxed; I rose to the surface and breathed as if it were my last. Scarcely, however, had I drawn my breath when I was again subjected to the same horrible treatment, with the addition of having my head hurt against the sides of the tank, and my poor body beaten and contused with blows, till the fear of murder prompted them to desist.¹

Pratt's depiction of her own punishment as she begged for the authorities to help Louise Cochran was the kind of evocative description central to the pamphlet Seven Months in the Kingston Lunatic Asylum, and What I Saw There, published in Jamaica in July 1860. Seven Months was written – in some fashion – by Ann Pratt, a mixed-race Jamaican woman who lived in the island's northwest parish of Hanover. It charts the horrors that she experienced and witnessed during her seven-month stay in the asylum and paints a devastating picture of an institution failing its mission to care for some of the island's most defenceless inhabitants.

Seven Months emerged at a critical juncture. By the summer of 1860 Kingston physician Lewis Quier Bowerbank had spent more than two years trying to convince Jamaican elites, local officials and Colonial Office bureaucrats that patient care in the asylum and the adjoining public hospital was compromised by the abhorrent physical conditions in both facilities; residents in the asylum were further threatened by the rampant abuse and neglect.² Familiar with the English state asylum system's aspirations to base treatments upon moral management principles, Bowerbank insisted that nothing less than imperial intervention could improve the quality of care. While the Colonial Office accepted the necessity of an investigation, they preferred if possible to leave that task to the governor of Jamaica. Yet the governor, Sir Charles Darling, vocally supported the head of both facilities, Dr James Scott, and was loath to criticize him or the asylum too harshly.

Seven Months transformed this local controversy into a much broader imperial scandal. Between Pratt's release in early July and the middle of the month, Pratt came into contact with Bowerbank, who presumably bankrolled her publication and may have helped her write it.³ By telling her story, Pratt cut through the personality conflicts that had slowed investigation into the asylum. Once colonial officials in London read the pamphlet, which Darling had enclosed in a formal dispatch to his superiors, they began asking informed questions about asylum practices, most notably tanking. They demanded investigations, upbraided Darling when the enquiries were not sufficiently penetrating, and then used the findings from a commissioned report as inspiration for an empire-wide questionnaire about colonial asylums.⁴ Clearly, this was a remarkable text, one woman's powerful and ultimately successful challenge to the medical authorities who abused their...