The Confinement of the Insane: International Perspectives, 1800–1965 ed. by Roy Porter, David Wright (review)

98 New Zealand Journal of History, 38, 1 (2004) Story! The lack of primary research and reliance on dated secondary sources was the most disappointing aspect of the book. The authors had not even engaged the latest scholarship, the most glaring omission being the highly praised Gallipoli 1915 by Canadian military historian Tim Travers, published in 2001, and the first study by a Western scholar to utilize the Turkish Military Archive. In general, moreover, there seemed an over-abundance of Australian sources for the Turkish story. Similarly, almost all the historic photos in this book are sourced from the Australian War Memorial. Too often, we get the Turkish story as seen through the eyes of Australians. While acknowledging the lack of diaries and letters of Turkish soldiers because of high levels of illiteracy and cultural reasons, one expected to hear more Turkish voices. In the last chapter the authors survey the rise of modern Turkey, Turkish migration to Australia since the 1960s, and the legacy of the campaign in Turkey and Australia, including an inconclusive survey of Turkish–Australian migrants’ views toward the commemoration of ANZAC Day in Australia. It is a mixed bag and raises the question of whether the authors might have been better to concentrate on the campaign or its legacy rather than attempt to cover both somewhat superficially. In conclusion, Gallipoli: The Turkish Story is, at 166 pages, slight in stature but also scholarship. This book may have served its purpose of igniting interest in the Turkish side of the story but this reviewer laments the missed opportunity of actually telling the full story. It reveals that what we require is more publications and English translations of the work of Turkish scholars such as Professor Kanan Celik. In the meantime, I recommend Travers’s Gallipoli 1915, for this author has at least entered the archival trenches on the Turkish side and engaged the primary sources. STEPHEN CLARKE Royal New Zealand Returned Services’Association The Confinement of the Insane: International Perspectives, 1800–1965. Edited by Roy Porter and David Wright. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003. 371 pp. US price: $70.00. ISBN 0-521-80206-7. THE HISTORY OF PSYCHIATRY, like the history of medicine generally, underwent major revision from the 1960s. Indeed psychiatry led the way for other branches of medicine, as its health professionals were subjected to intense and damning criticism by historians. Following Thomas Szasz and the anti-psychiatry movement and the works of Michel Foucault, psychiatrists (or ‘alienists’) were no longer portrayed as benevolent heroes and asylums as places of care and cure. Rather, psychiatrists were seen as oppressors of the people, forcing them into straitjackets of conformity in an industrial capitalist society and the asylum as the institutional setting which allowed such control. More recently, historians have begun to question this interpretation, arguing that the asylum, far from being a weapon in the hands of the profession and the establishment, was a contested site, subject to negotiation between different parties, including families and patients themselves. This collected volume is part of that revision and includes case studies of asylum histories from around the world. A major theme is to dispute the medicalization of psychiatry and the growing power of the profession. For example, in her chapter on asylums in Victoria, Australia, Cathy Coleborne shows how families, police, asylum authorities and patients all played a role in negotiating admission and asylum experiences. Indeed the police even performed a medical role in late nineteenth-century Victoria. Elaine Murphy writing on nineteenthcentury London asylums, and Elizabeth Malcolm on nineteenth- and twentieth-century 99 Irish asylums, stress the role of the family in the committal process, questioning the supposed medical capture of madness by an incipient psychiatric profession. One of the strengths of the volume is the extensive use by contributors of patients’ records. Andrea Dorries and Thomas Beddies analyse 4000 case histories in a Berlin psychiatric hospital from 1919 to 1960, uncovering patient profiles and experiences in that institution. Research of admission records by Harriet Deacon (South Africa) and Jacques Gasser and Genevieve Heller (Switzerland) demonstrate a complexity of medical and social criteria in the admission process. Analyzing the admissions to two asylums in Victoria...