The 'Red Plague' and General Paralysis of the Insane at Callan Park Hospital Hospital for the Insane in New South Wales 1877-1920

Abstract

From the mid-nineteenth century, state asylums throughout the western world began to play an ever-increasing role in welfare provision. Callan Park asylum in Sydney was required to perform multiple roles because people with behavioural difficulties or incurable neurological disorders were rejected by other welfare institutions and the penal system. These patients included persons suffering from a prevalent and severely disabling form of end-stage neurosyphilis, General Paralysis of the Insane (GPI). This article explains how and why GPI patients in New South Wales were almost exclusively cared for within asylums, making them major providers of care for terminal venereal disease. While GPI had been initially seen as a mental illness with physical manifestations, statistical analysis and new diagnostic technology brought about a radical change in the public perception of GPI patients from about 1910, which meant that they would now be further stigmatised as carriers of syphilis, the dreaded 'Red Plague'.