"'He is what we would call a very good attendant, who would not run away or flinch from any patient, but would try to have his orders carried out if possible.' Such was the view of William Coady, attendant to the insane in the British settler colony of Victoria, Australia in the 1870s." "Attending Madness is a history of William Coady's occupation, a history of asylum work and workers in nineteenth-century Australia. It considers not only who attendants were and why they worked in the asylum, but also how they and others variously defined 'the very good attendant'." "Colonial asylum advocates imagined the attendant as an archetype, drawing on ideas from Britain about the nature of insanity and its treatment. In exploring the articulation of these ideas in a colonial context, and their effect on the asylum workplace, Lee-Ann Monk makes an important contribution to the international history of the asylum. She also opens new dimensions in the history of this occupation, on which the fate of patients very much depended, by analysing attendants' efforts to construct an occupational identity and give meaning to their work, thus providing new insights into their sense of themselves and their occupation."--BOOK JACKET.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 229-245) and index.