‘The Unseen Enemy Persists’: Delusion, Trauma and the South African War in Australian Asylum Case Notes

Summary Australian troops travelling to South Africa in 1899 to join Britain in fighting the Boers left behind communities consumed with the conflict. The colonies that would form the Australian nation in 1901 organised parades, concerts and eagerly awaited news from the battlefield. This article analyses these cultural responses to the South African War alongside the experiences of institutionalised delusional men. It traces ways the conflict penetrated the walls of Australian asylums, and the minds of the insane within them, as well as the sane existing in society. Delusions based on the conflict appeared not only in the words of men who had travelled to South Africa, but also those who were evidently deeply affected by Australian involvement in the war, following the fervour within the societies from which they came. The resulting analysis of the words and experiences of the insane expands the historiography of the conflict in new ways.

• Publication year

  2023

• Venue

  Social history of medicine : the journal of the Society for the Social History of Medicine

• Publication date

  2023-03-18

• Fields of study

  Sociology, Medicine, History

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1093/shm/hkac049PMID 37533511PMCID 10392360
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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