Colonial Psychiatry Hub

6:06, 26 June 2011

By Dr Javier Bandrés, Universidad Complutense de Madrid
The Spanish doctors Vicente Beato and Ramon Villarino published in 1944 the work Capacidad mental del negro (Mental capacity of the black), in that they presented the results of their investigations in the Spanish colony of Equatorial Guinea. These investigators applied to a group of natives the Yerkes and [...]

18:39, 30 January 2011

I recently discovered Google’s Ngram Viewer, thanks to a post on Anterotesis blog.The Ngram Viewer trends the use of words in a selection of their store of books, over a set period. According to the unofficial ‘Google Operating System‘ blog the Ngram searches through 5.2 million books from Google’s 15 million strong store.
The Viewer itself [...]

18:42, 20 January 2011

I gave my first one hour paper at my departmental seminar on Monday (woop!). One of the questions I received was about ‘Western psychiatry’. Specifically, whether the range of theories and treatments that comprised ‘Western psychiatry’ makes this term problematic for use in historical analyses.
This got me thinking about the terms ‘colonial psychiatry’ and ‘East [...]

12:48, 7 January 2011

The History Blogging Project will be launched at an event hosted by The History Lab on Tuesday 18 January. Starting at 6pm, there will be short talks on a range of issues connected to blogging as a postgraduate historian, including ‘why blog’, ‘finding time to blog’ and ‘blogging and public engagement’. There will also be [...]

8:19, 11 August 2010

Among the admissions registers of the C.M.S. Toro Hospital (now Kabarole Hospital, Fort Portal, Uganda) is an interesting case of bewitchment. In 1927, the head of Toro Hospital, Dr. A. T. Schofield, diagnosed a sixteen year old girl as being ‘Bewitched’. She was admitted to the hospital for 11 days, by which time she had [...]

8:12, 11 July 2010

When reading through patient case notes I like to think about sounds: those made by the patient, the hospital staff, as well as the more general noise of the ward. Sometimes the noise and general disruption caused by patients upon admission can be inferred from prescription lists – sedatives such as potassium bromide being a [...]

14:40, 3 July 2010

I’ve had my share of problems working in African archives – missing files, rats, mental hospital patients…yet at one archive I visited in East Africa, I experienced something a bit different – distrust.
I was looking at patient records from the early twentieth century, searching for the few cases of mental illness to be found among [...]

22:36, 26 May 2010

I had an interesting email this morning from someone at the Dr. Guislain Museum, Ghent, Belgium. The museum focuses on the History of Psychiatry (Dr. Joseph Guislain was a ‘pioneer in psychiatry’ according to Wikipedia) and has a particularly strong focus on the portrayal of mental illness and psychiatry in art and photography.
One of the [...]

12:04, 5 May 2010

While at the University of Birmingham Special Collections over the Easter break, I came across a number of files which are closed for access by historians until 2023 at the earliest. These included lists of missionaries invalided from various field-stations around the world for a range of reasons, including mental breakdown.
Closure periods ranging from 30-50 [...]

21:49, 27 April 2010

I returned recently from a two week research trip in Birmingham where I worked my way through the Uganda and Medical correspondence files of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) at Birmingham University Special Collections. As I had already come across an interesting reference to psychiatric symptoms among sleeping sickness victims in a 1907 Colonial Office report [...]

18:11, 8 April 2010

Notice from a group of students at the University of Warwick:
We are a group of postgraduate students based at the Centre for the History of Medicine at the University of Warwick, trying to encourage the growth of a student-led network of postgrads working within the history of medicine at different institutions around the country.  We [...]

21:54, 31 March 2010

I’ve been working through the Colonial Office Uganda correspondence at the National Archives over the past few days, which include a number of documents relating to the sleeping sickness epidemic during the first two decades of the twentieth century. I was interested to see if there was any comment on the occurrence of insanity in [...]

20:50, 21 March 2010

Having finished reading through missionary accounts of fear, witchcraft and ’superstition’ in East Africa in the Church Missionary Society medical mission journal (Mercy and Truth, later The Mission Hospital, later The Way of Healing), 1897-1940, I present here a few preliminary conclusions:
Church Missionary Society (C.M.S.) medical missionary accounts constructed East African society as one where [...]

11:34, 22 February 2010

The archives of Mengo Hospital are housed in the Albert Cook Medical Library at Mulago Hospital, Kampala. This is an extremely rich collection which includes fairly complete and detailed patient records over the period 1897-1944 for both European and African patients (those from the Maternity Training School are in Luganda). There is also extensive additional [...]

16:46, 12 February 2010

I read an interesting post about Bryan Charnley on the Medical Humanities blog earlier today. As the post explains: ‘Bryan Charnley was an artist and schizophrenic patient, he started the ‘Self Portraits Series’ in 1991 and was encouraged by a friend to keep a diary that explained the imagery of the portraits’. The paintings inserted into the [...]

10:20, 11 February 2010

I stumbled across an interesting online network earlier called ‘Madness: Probing the Boundaries‘. The network is part of Inter-Disciplinary.Net, and seeks to ‘encourage innovative inter, multi and post disciplinary dialogues’ in issues of madness ‘across historical periods and within cultural, political and social contexts’.
The website is not particularly easy to navigate, but contains some great [...]

6:22, 11 February 2010

The medical missionary is conspicuously absent from historical literature on colonial psychiatry
I see the absence of the medical missionary as linked to the preoccupation of historians with the colonial asylum. Studies of colonial asylums, including Mathari (Kenya) and Ingutsheni (Southern Rhodesia), have highlighted the insignificant role played by the asylum within a larger structure of colonial [...]

6:15, 6 February 2010

Hello. This blog is where I intend to chart the ups and downs of my PhD over the next few years. I am now 4 months in, and the size of what I’ve signed up for is beginning to sink in. But for now, let us begin with a little about my research project as [...]