Automaton(tik): In Remembrance of the Patients of the Fort England Psychiatric Hospital
In 2025, the Fort England Psychiatric Hospital will celebrate its 150th anniversary. This milestone marks the Hospital as the oldest South African psychiatric facility that is still in use today. To help us remember the patients, I composed poems for 25 individuals who were institutionalised in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The 25 individuals form part of a larger set of 200 patients whose case files were recently discovered in one of the Hospital’s cabinets and are now in...
