"Dangerous to Know: Early Colonial Doctors and Asylums in South East Queensland"

In the mid-19th century most doctors believed that cold water immersion, straightjackets and brandy would cure a disturbed person.

In the early 1860s, Queensland’s new colonial government hurriedly ordered a mental asylum to be built at Woogaroo. Another asylum for the poor and chronically ill was set up on Stradbroke Island.

None of the staff understood the problems they would face.Lack of skill and effective drugs were not the only reasons why patients received little care. The doctors had other priorities, ambitions, sectarian divisions and professional jealousies. Often described in biographies as medical heroes, many of these men were dangerous to know.

The Brisbane Courier summed it up in 1869.….the inmates of such an institution are at the mercy of' warders and nurses. As long as these do not quarrel among themselves, or are satisfied to keep each other's secrets, there is apparently no cruelty which they may not perpetrate undiscovered and unpunished. In this case the violence used threatened the immediate death of the patient…