Mental Health reports added to Medical History of British India website

Those of you who regularly read this blog will know that I have been working on the digitisation of lunatic asylum reports from British India for some while.

I am delighted to announce that they have been added to the Medical History of British India website as the 'Medicine - Mental health' collection.

The 20,000 pages cover the period of 1867 - 1948 and describe the patients, staff and conditions of asylums throughout colonial India. This free to access material provides extensive research on responses to mental illness when the asylum's role was changing. Detailed reports show how 'moral management' was used by British colonists to treat native and European patients. This material will be particularly valuable to genealogists and those interested in the history of psychiatry, Indian and colonial history.

Please do have a browse and remember that the reports are searchable; just click on 'include book content' when you search.

The material, from the National Library's India Papers collection, was microfilmed and digitised using a grant from the Wellcome Trust.

(Picture shows Block plan of Rangoon Lunatic Asylum from 1893, image number: http://digital.nls.uk/83977693)

Celtic Connections?

We've been fortunate to be awarded more funds from the Wellcome Trust to digitise more material for the Medical History of British India Online project, this time the reports of the Lunatic Asylums. They're a fascinating resource for the study of mental illness, but also very revealing of social and moral attitudes of the day.

One, General report no. 6 on the lunatic asylums, vaccination and dispensaries in the Bengal Presidency, 1873 reports that "Burmans are like Celts - clannish; they associate and combine together for mischief ...they defy discipline...and incite misconduct in others..."

Of the types of mental illness documented, most are reported to be the result of ganja, but also includes "40 patients addicted to onanism, which I consider to be a predisposing cause to idiotcy ... in spite of every care and treatment, they still continue to practice this fatal vice, which has already deprived them of reason and is hurrying them to their graves."

These 40 are men, but the women are the subject of study because of the "[probability] of menstrual irregularity being the existing cause of insanity". Anyone who's had PMS ( or been on the receiving end!) will sympathise...