The Ruly and the Unruly

Kevin Izod O’Doherty, Young Irelander, political exile, Queensland politician and medical practitioner, defined asylum management in 1877: ‘The primary classification would, in effect, be between those who are easy to rule and those who are unruly—between the refractory ones and the contrary.’ ¹ The polarities speak as much of a political imagination in the management of the insane as of a medical discourse seeking to find, beneath the symptoms of disorder, the clues to diagnosis and future treatment. And precisely in pointing to the polarity of ruly versus unruly, O’Doherty’s phrase evokes a broader set of contexts and possibilities which the asylum embodied. Its inmates were there above all because they were dangerous to themselves or others, or because they were incapable of governing themselves. The possibility of their release depended on their reaching a threshold where their unruliness had been overcome, or was simply diminished to a point where they were no longer dangerous to themselves or others. This chapter explores some of the ways in which the lunatic asylum—its location, its architecture, its regimes of personal management —functioned as an institution of isolation as well as an institution of inclusion, even of social reintegration, for those who could become once again ‘easy to rule’.