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)

I see the bad moon arising

As part of my India Papers digitisation job I quality check digital images and microfilm; yesterday I came across a couple of interesting pages from a lunatic asylum in Bengal, 1868.
The author was investigating the influence of climate and lunar phases on insanity. His experiment showed that the “waning moon had more apparent influence on the insanes than the waxing moon; but this can only be accidental, for though her face is less visible, she is still in her place in the heavens, and her attractive power (if any) must still be exerted; and that she really exerts no influence whatever.” The page shown is the table of results on which the author based his conclusion, which states at the head of the page “that there is no such person as a lunatic.” (Click on image to enlarge)


Full moons have long been associated with insanity, hence the term “lunatic,” borrowed from the Latin “lunacus.” In India patients with mental illness were known as “lunatics” or “insanes” until the 1920’s. This preceded the UK Mental Treatment Act of 1930 which changed the term to “person of unsound mind.”
Today, scientists are still researching correlations between illnesses such as schizophrenia and epilepsy and the full moon period. The police are also studying the influence of the moon on violent and criminal behaviour.
The next full moon is tomorrow, 23rd October, so perhaps we should take note of the Creedence Clearwater Revival song....

(Moon photo credit: www.commons.wikimedia.org)

A man of wide interests

Andrew Duncan Senior: physician of the Enlightenment, edited by John Chalmers.

Dr Andrew Duncan (1744-1828) is best known for his founding role in the Edinburgh Lunatic Asylum. When Edinburgh Royal Infirmary was built in 1738, twelve rooms were set aside for care of the insane, but these had been abandoned to other uses. A Charity Workhouse Bedlam and private "mad houses" existed, but were overcrowded or costly, thus excluding pauper lunatics.
Duncan attended a mentally ill poet, Robert Fergusson, who was forcibly locked up in the Edinburgh Bedlam, and after Fergusson's early death he wrote, "His case, however, afforded me an opportunity of witnessing the deplorable situation of Pauper Lunatics even in the opulent, flourishing, and charitable Metropolis of Scotland."
In 1790, when he became President of the Royal College of Physicians, Duncan started the campaign for a lunatic asylum in Edinburgh.
The foundation stone was laid three years later in 1809 and the first patient admitted in summer 1813. Edinburgh Lunatic Asylum was sited in Morningside, but it proved financially impossible to admit pauper patients. Duncan tried to raise more funds to complete the building, and died in 1828, with the asylum admitting only 40 fee-paying patients annually. Lack of money in his lifetime proved to thwart his ambition of a facility open to all.
In the following years the asylum thrived, and pressure to admit pauper patients increased until fee-payers were turned away. In 1869 it was reported that 7,144 patients had been admitted since opening, and in the 1920s the "Royal Ed" became a renowned academic and therapeutic centre.
The original Craighouse complex is now part of Napier University and has been renamed the Thomas Clouston Clinic.
This book explores Duncan's wide interests, organisational vigour and his commitment to public health. It contains some fascinating drawings of Edinburgh 19th century medical institutions and includes an extensive bibliography.

Out of Mind

BBC Four has been showing Mental: A History of the Madhouse and it is still available on BBC iplayer.
The documentary tells the fascinating and poignant story of the closure of Britain's mental asylums. In the post-war period, 150,000 people were hidden away in 120 of these vast Victorian institutions all across the country. Today, most mental patients, or service users as they are now called, live out in the community and the asylums have all but disappeared. Through powerful testimonies from patients, nurses and doctors, the film explores this seismic revolution and what it tells us about society's changing attitudes to mental illness over the last sixty years.
Explore online what life was like in an asylum by visiting the educational History to Her Story, which features case notes from West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum.
(main text from BBC website, photo of Insane Asylum Brentwood from depletedcranium.com)

Joy and insanity in late 19th Century India

Today I have been generating metadata for the Lunatic Asylum annual reports of Madras, 1877-1891 which will be digitised over the summer. Reading the reports more closely is a favourite part of my job.
These present interesting details of how mental illness was treated in British India at the time. The causes of insanity were divided into two main groups, physical and moral.
Physical causes included narcotic drug use, epilepsy, fever, concussion, privation (deprivation) and over-study. Grief, love and jealousy, disgrace, fear, religion and vicious habit were listed as moral causes (1882-83).

Treatment of patients (typically called lunatics or insanes until around the 1920s)emphasised "occupation, out-door exercises, good food, occasional recreation and at all times careful supervision." (1881-82, W.R. Cornish, Surgeon-General).
Occupations consisted mostly of gardening and growing food, making mats and baskets for income generation, plus upkeep of asylum grounds and clothing.

Medicinal remedies are few, as A.N. Rogers Harrison wrote in 1881: "Little specific value is attached to the curative properties of medicines...however, opium and its derivatives, bromide of potassium, hydrate of chloral...together with counter-irritation and the cold and tepid baths are all remedies that have proved of distinct service."

The image of a chained or straight-jacketed Victorian inmate is dispelled when reading these reports. Indeed, "There is no restraint during the day, however violent the patient may be; these are simply watched. At night the noisy, violent, filthy are placed in cells by themselves." (H.D. Cook, 1881)

Funds were set aside for amusements, as in 1882: "At Christmas there was the usual treat, with sport, fireworks and a band. If this concentrated joy were distributed through the year, it would do more good. Native music, sweets, jugglers and a few fireworks once a month would, at a cheap rate, give pleasure to many." (S.L. Dobie)
I will be comparing these approaches with later ones as I go through the Mental Health collection, which dates to around 1940.

(picture credit: Wellcome Images, showing Lawrence Asylum, Ootakamund, Madras (1873) and Small images of men and children, all of whom show signs of insanity (undated))