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Medicine in the mid-19th century was on the threshold of life-saving discoveries and developments so a doctor might use leeches to bleed a patient one day and an anaesthetic for an operation on the next. But for mental illness, real treatment was still very distant. Most doctors believed that cold water immersion, straightjackets and brandy would cure a disturbed person.

In Queensland’s early years as a colony, the government hurriedly ordered a mental asylum to be built at Woogaroo. Another asylum for the poor and chronically ill was set up on Stradbroke Island. To assess people’s state of mind, a Reception House was opened in the old barracks on Spring Hill.

The medical men, with no training in mental illness, would oversee these places, and employ staff based on their physical strength. Lack of skill and effective drugs were not the only reasons why patients received little care. The doctors had other priorities, ambitions, sectarian divisions and professional jealousies. Often described in biographies as medical heroes, many of these men were dangerous to know.

 

The Brisbane Courier summed it up neatly in 1869.

 

 ….the inmates of such an institution are at the mercy of' warders and nurses. As long as these do not quarrel among themselves, or are satisfied to keep each other's secrets, there is apparently no cruelty which they may not perpetrate undiscovered and unpunished. In this case the violence used threatened the immediate death of the patient…