| مستخلص: |
The current site interpretation of the cemetery at Gladesville Hospital, in New South Wales (NSW), Australia, makes use of several tropes frequently perpetuated in descriptions of graveyards attached to nineteenth-century psychiatric institutions. The underlying assumption is that the site contains 1,226 unmarked burials which are symbolic of a horrendous social marginalisation, and that these people were swiftly ‘forgotten’ in death due to the stigma of being buried in an institutional graveyard. By contrasting Gladesville’s institutional cemetery with other public graveyards in NSW, this article finds that in fact Gladesville’s burial ground presented a rather good deal to its pauper patients since it offered memorialisation, and high security, which was in stark juxtaposition with public burials off-site. This article, in addition, analyses the death rituals carried out at Gladesville, for a range of burial-types including that of patients, staff and others, and considers the use of these bodies in terms of post-mortem rates and the collection of anatomical samples. The processes at Gladesville shed light on practices carried out in the UK, and also offer a contrast to some Victorian-era British hospitals for the insane. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |