In June 1907, Dr Thomas Duncan Greenlees informed the Colonial Office of theCape of his intention to retire. He testified that since 1890, ‘Ihave worked strenuously for the good of the institutions I have had chargeof.’ The institutions were situated in Makhanda, formerly known asGrahamstown, and included the Grahamstown Lunatic Asylum (hereafter‘the asylum’), where he was the medical superintendent from1890 to 1907; the Chronic Sick Hospital, where he was thesurgeon-superintendent from 1890 to 1903; and the Institute for ImbecileChildren, which he founded in 1895 and was its visiting medical officeruntil 1907. During his tenure at these institutions, Greenlees was prolificin his public and professional engagements. He gave numerous publiclectures, hosted public activities at the asylum, as well as founding andediting an asylum magazine titled the Fort England Mirror.Greenlees achieved prominence in the Cape medical fraternity as a member ofthe Eastern Province branch of the British Medical Association and he servedas its president in 1897 and again in 1903. He was also a member of theEastern Province Literary and Scientific Society, the South African MedicalAssociation and the South African Association for the Advancement ofScience. He was a prolific author of psychiatric studies, some of which werepublished in journals of critical acclaim, including the SouthAfrican Medical Journal, the British Journal ofPsychiatry and the American Journal ofPsychiatry.

In his public engagements, two of Greenlees's priorities wereaddressing the stigma of the asylum and mental illness and encouraging thepublic to provide charitable aid to the institutionalised patients under hiscare. Greenlees was a laudable public campaigner for destigmatising theasylum and mental illness, and magnanimous in fostering public charity forthe institutionalised patients. This is in stark contrast to hisprofessional engagements, where he denounced children with intellectualdisabilities as ‘helpless waifs’ and declared them‘monstrosities’ that should be condemned by the government to‘destruction’. Greenlees was thus Janus-faced: in his publicintellectualism, he successfully produced and promoted a positive image ofthe asylum, but in his professional tenure, he denied children withintellectual disabilities their personhood and their humanness and advocatedfor their extermination.

This chapter seeks to investigate the Janus-faced nature of Greenlees, byadopting John Law's pinboard approach. A pinboard account can be‘understood as the inverse of narrative.