Covering all historical periods and geographical contexts, the series explores how mental illness has been understood, experienced, diagnosed, treated and contested. It will publish works that engage actively with contemporary debates related to mental health and, as such, will be of interest not only to historians, but also mental health professionals, patients and policy makers. With its focus on mental health, rather than just psychiatry, the series will endeavour to provide more patient-centred histories. Although this has long been an aim of health historians, it has not been realised, and this series aims to change that. The scope of the series is kept as broad as possible to attract good quality proposals about all aspects of the history of mental health from all periods. The series emphasises interdisciplinary approaches to the field of study, and encourages short titles, longer works, collections, and titles which stretch the boundaries of academic publishing in new ways.

No abstract

This article uses the experiences of ship’s fireman Harold Shaw to expose the confused early twentieth-century legal framework used to restrict the mobility of undesirable merchant seamen. Labelled invariably as a ‘nuisance’, a ‘malingerer’, ‘mentally-deficient’ and ‘epileptic’, Shaw was classed as a prohibited immigrant in New Zealand. Bureaucratic records are used to tell of his life ‘in transit’. His wanderlust took him from Manchester, England, to Tasmania, the Antarctic, New Zealand and back again. Initially hailed as an Antarctic hero alongside his fellows on the Aurora, one-half of Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, he was unceremoniously expelled from New Zealand. Shaw managed to enter the country again in less glamorous, but no less dramatic circumstances. Local authorities struggled to reconcile the complex legislation designed to protect the health of arriving seamen, but more so that of the public, to deal with Shaw’s liminal status.