Megan J. Coyer and David E. Shuttleton (eds), Scottish Medicine and Literary Culture, 1726-1832 (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2014), pp. v-xi, 315, $98.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-90-420-3891-2.

on gender as a category within the racial majority – whites of European extraction – in both institutions in order to study colonial ideologies of masculinity and femininity. In particular, men who apparently were too mentally and physically weak to cope with the harsh conditions of colonial life, and women who could not fulfil their functions of giving birth and raising children, caused anxieties about the viability of the colonies. Yet the prognosis of future usefulness was gendered, too: while men detained in the asylums had failed, institutionalised women could be rescued. The sixth and final chapter deals with those considered ‘the other’ on a racial basis. The Chinese in Melbourne and Maori in Auckland were small yet visible minorities both in the asylums and in the general population. By subjecting them to the process of categorisation in the casebooks, the institutions marked their difference not only in racial but also in social and cultural terms. In her conclusion, Coleborne emphasises the power of institutions to produce categories, to subject people to them, to create social and cultural norms and, thus, to include and exclude individuals, to create social structures, attribute social status and construct racial and gender identities. She also highlights the importance of the local as well as the imperial context for these processes. Yet, despite this insistence, the results for both case studies remain amorphous and indistinct. Despite the potential for a comparative or entangled historical perspective, Coleborne homogenises Melbourne and Auckland. Thus, the data collected in the casebooks of the Yarra Bend Asylum and the Auckland Asylum serve Coleborne to mutually reinforce her conclusions about the production of a colonial white settler identity in both institutions and not to point out local peculiarities of Victorian and New Zealand identities. She locates complexity and difference within Australia and New Zealand, not between them. This emphasis on the commonalities also makes it more difficult to determine the specifics of both Australasian colonies within the framework of the Empire or, more generally, the formation of modern institutions and societies. Therefore, the ‘Empire’ Coleborne refers to in the book’s title remains remarkably vague. Imperial power structures and connections rarely feature prominently. The book’s perspective is firmly Australasian; the British Empire serves mainly as a backdrop for local developments while its relevance for the case studies remains unclear. In the end, ‘Insanity, Identity and Empire’ leaves the impression of a contribution to the regional debate about the national identity of two former colonies of white settlement in the age of globalisation and multicultural immigration.