Lunatic Asylums

ABSTRACT
This important essay looks at white female mental health in the British Raj in the second half of the nineteenth century. As a topic, the white woman's mental health is under-researched in colonial psychiatry and colonial gender studies.  This paper  begins by examining some of the  contemporary gendered theories on psychiatry  by examining  prominent  metropolitan medical hand-books on psychiatry. It explores some of the manifestations of chronic female mental disorders that could be discerned among white women in colonial Indian society, including neurasthenia, and hysteria.  The  gendered traumas  of war and their psychological  fallout  too are touched upon..Shifting focus to the Lunatic Asylums of British India, we study the Bhowanipore whites only asylum.  The essay concludes with a study of case histories from asylums in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras where white women patients - generally of the lower social orders - who suffered from 'major' mental illness, were incarcerated.
The materials drawn upon include medical text books, contemporary  periodicals, literary and non-literary printed books of British India,  Annual Reports of lunatic asylums, medical certificates, and Certificates of admission.

KEYWORDS:
colonial mental health, Rebellion of 1857, colonial Lunatic asylums, women and madness

This chapter focuses on the development of psychiatry in the Romanian Principalities and, afterwards, in the Romanian Kingdom, until the end of WWII. It explores in greater detail the evolution of ideas on work therapy and other occupations in four main cities of the country (Bucharest, Iași, Craiova and Sibiu) where the most important public asylums were located. The published works of leading Romanian psychiatrists have been explored, in order to understand the origins, interpretations and applications, in daily practice, of their ideas and theories. Some of the authors argued for, and some against, the use of colonies of the Belgian type, but they all shared the common view that work had both economic and medical benefits for inpatients. Influenced by key figures of European psychiatry, during their studies abroad, or by the results of their own field trips to major European asylums, Romanian specialists also influenced each other. They all discussed, in their publications, the state of the art strategies in matters of work therapy. In summary, we claim that, from a transnational standpoint, this cross-fertilisation of ideas and practices and transfers of knowledge were characteristic of psychiatry in European countries. In Romaniaʼs case such transfers were not mechanical, but part of a process of critical reflection and adaptation to conditions existing in different regions of the country at the time.

Draft paper based on a talk given to Women in Archaeology Conference, Sydney, and the Australasian Society for Historical Archaeology Conference, Bendigo, 1999

For more developed ideas see
Piddock, S (2011) ‘To Each a Space: Class, Classification and Gender in Colonial South Australian Institutions’. Historical Archaeology. 45 (3), 89-105 on this site