Male patients communicating restored mental health by their facial expressions and gentlemanly persona at the Grahamstown Lunatic Asylum, 1890-1907

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.