At Home in the Asylum: Seacliff, 1880-1920 – Barbara Brookes

In this presentation I will discuss the work of Frederic Truby King, Medical superintendent at the Seacliff Asylum from 1889 until 1921, in his attempts to make a difficult and forbidding building ‘homelike’. I will discuss the interaction between Dunedin and the farm asylum and the experiences that brought patients into Seacliff.

Barbara Brookes is Professor Emerita, University of Otago where  Barbara taught a third year paper in the History of Medicine and she has published widely in that field. She also supervised research students working on various aspects of New Zealand’s medical History. Together with Professor Charlotte Paul she founded the Medical Humanities Selves programme for third year students in 1996 and she founded, with Sue Wootton, the blog corpus.nz for conversations between medicine and the humanities.