Health
If as Tilburg suggested, from early childhood, Routledge had suffered from what is today believed to have been the developing stages of paranoid schizophrenia, it is surprising that she was able to get the valuable anthropolical research, often under arduous conditions involving living in close quarters with others for years, she did, with no sign of the condition. In her recent biography, Jo Anne Van Tilburg related that Katherine's brother, Harold Pease, also suffered from mental illness, although whether he also suffered from schizophrenia is unclear. She became involved with Spiritualism during her Oxford years and practiced automatic writing.
After 1925, her schizophrenia got worse and displayed itself in the form of delusional paranoia. She threw Scoresby out of her Hyde Park, London mansion and locked herself inside. She also hid many of her field notes. Her family blamed Angata, accusing her of being a "witch doctor". In 1929 Scoresby and her family had her kidnapped against her will and confined to a mental institution. This diagnosis is contentious; Jo Anne Van Tilburg, for example in a recent lecture on the subject at the Royal Geographical Society, said that the Easter Islanders themselves displayed symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia, which is clearly at odds with anthropological understandings of Polynesian culture.
She died institutionalized in 1935. Her husband gave the field notes he found to the Royal Geographical Society. One of his executors found photographs of the Easter Island expedition ten years after his death. Maps of the expedition were found in Scoresby's house in Cyprus in 1961. Family papers and photographs, previously unpublished, including details of her illness, were made public through her recent biography. Archaeology on Easter Island continues to make use of her field notes and ethnographic research.
Read more about this topic: Katherine Routledge
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—Nancy Press Hawley. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, ch. 6 (1978)