Epilepsy, Asylums and Medical History in Colonial SA

Name: Epilepsy, Asylums and Medical History in Colonial SA
Start: 2026-10-06T19:00:00+09:30
End: 2026-10-06T19:00:00+09:30
Location: Genealogy SA

Unravelling Myths

About

Join professional historian Maggi Boult as she shares her insights into the history of South Australian colonial medicine, particularly the colony's lunatic asylums.

'St Augustine says, the dead are invisible, they are not absent. You needn’t believe in ghosts to see that’s true. We carry the genes and the culture of our ancestors, and what we think about them shapes what we think of ourselves, and how we make sense of our time and place. Are these good times, bad times, interesting times? We rely on history to tell us.' (Hilary Mantel, 2017)

Despite Mantel’s conviction, the message in Australia is that history is not important. In this talk, Maggi Boult will show how historical research can deepen both personal and cultural understanding. Beginning with an overview of medicine in colonial South Australia, Maggi will describe her research into patients admitted with epilepsy to the colony’s lunatic asylums. What she found challenged not only the familiar picture of asylum life, but also the story her own family had passed down.

Maggi’s great-uncle was admitted to an English asylum with epilepsy at the age of sixteen. From an early age, she heard family stories about the injustice of his incarceration: ‘he only had epilepsy’. His experience appeared to fit the familiar image of nineteenth-century asylums as places where people were unjustly confined, abandoned and forgotten.

This talk explores how archival records can bring hidden lives into view, dispel long-standing myths and sometimes change what we believe about our own past.