Abstract:
During the medical superintendence of Dr Thomas Duncan Greenlees at the
Grahamstown Lunatic Asylum, from 1890 to 1907, he was watchful of his patients’
appearances, facial expressions and conduct. Of particular interest, Greenlees would
closely monitor the patients’ faces to identify if there were any involuntary
expressions that were indicators of underlying emotional unease or mental distress.
Greenlees thus regarded involuntary facial expressions as a litmus test of a patient’s
recovery, but it was the patient’s conscious facial expressions, as well as their
presentation of upstanding behaviour and conduct, that signalled to the staff that
they were self-composed, and hence on the path towards convalescence. In this
article, I explore how three white male patients of the Asylum communicated their
convalescence and/or restored mental health to the staff by posing for their
casebook photographs and by presenting a gentlemanly persona. To this end, I
interpret the photographs of the three men alongside entries from their casebooks
as an interface to explore dimensions of time that lie outside the split second that
was captured by the camera lens. In doing so, the glimpses of a patient’s agency and
appearance in a photograph can be understood and compared with their
performance of a gentlemanly persona that was recorded in the casebooks.
