European madness and gender in nineteenth-century British India

Social History of Medicine

Volumn 9, Issue 3, 1996, Pages 357-382

  Ernst, Waltraud ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

British India; Colonialism; Empire; Gender; Lunatic asylums; Mental health; Military life; Race; Social class; Victorian Britain

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; EUROPE; FEMALE; HISTORY; HUMAN; INDIA; MENTAL DISEASE; MENTAL HEALTH; MENTAL HOSPITAL; POLITICAL SYSTEM; SEX; UNITED KINGDOM; WOMEN'S HEALTH;

COLONIALISM; EUROPE; FEMALE; GREAT BRITAIN; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HOSPITALS, PSYCHIATRIC; HUMANS; INDIA; MENTAL DISORDERS; MENTAL HEALTH; SEX; WOMEN'S HEALTH;

EID: 0030323898     PISSN: 0951631X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/shm/9.3.357     Document Type: Article

References (142)

1. India Office Records, London (hereafter IOR), Records of Pembroke House and Ealing Lunatic Asylum 1818-1892 (hereafter PELA): Medical Certificates 1843, and Registers of Admissions 1870-1888. [Case of Mrs Joanah K.]. All unreferenced quotes refer to these sources.
2. P. Spear, The Nabobs. A Study of the Social Life of the English in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century India (London and Dublin, 1980) [1932, 1963], p. 126.
3. On reasons for immigration restrictions and related colonial policies during this period see D. Arnold, 'White Colonization and Labour in Nineteenth-Century India', Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 11 (1983), 133-58.
4. See Evidence of Sir J. Lawrence, in Royal Commission on the Sanitary State of the Army in India (London, 1863), p. 199.
5. IOR (PELA): Medical Certificates 1843. [Cases of Henry B., James B., William W.].
6. For further details of the history of Pembroke House and the Royal India Asylum see W. Ernst and D. Kantowsky, 'The Records of Pembroke House and Ealing Lunatic Asylum, 1818-1892', Society, 22 (1985), 31-9,
7. and W. Ernst, Mad Tales from the Raj. The European Insane in Nineteenth-Century British India (London and New York, 1991).
8. For life in the East India Company's army see D. M. Peers, Between Mars and Mammon. Colonial Armies and the Garrison State in India, 1819-1835 (London and New York, 1995).
9. E. Showalter, The Female Malady. Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980 (New York, 1985).
10. Showalter, The Female Malady, p. 14.
11. IOR (PELA): Medical Certificates 1863-1864. [Case of Mrs Elizabeth C.]. For details on the rebellion of 1857 (called 'mutiny' by the British and 'war of independence' by Indian nationalists) see R. C. Majumdar, The Sepoy Mutiny and the Revolt of 1857 (Calcutta, 1957),
12. F. W. Rawding, The Rebellion in India, 1857 (Cambridge, 1977),
13. E. Stokes, The Peasant and the Raj: Studies in Agrarian Society and Peasant Rebellion in Colonial India (Cambridge, 1978).
14. V. Skultans, English Madness. Ideas on Insanity 1580-1890 (London, 1979).
15. P. Chesler, Women and Madness (London, 1972),
16. B. Ehrenreich and F. English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women (London, 1979),
17. A. Oakley, Sex, Gender and Society (London, 1972).
18. Showalter, The Female Malady, p. 4.
19. The superintendent of the Bhowanipur Lunatic Asylum at Calcutta even pointed out that for women asylum inmates 'grief and hereditary transmission are the only antecedents on record'. IOR: Annual Report of the European Lunatic Asylum, Bhowanipore for the Year 1867. Calcutta, 1867.
20. See for examples J. Alexander, Voices and Echoes: Tales from Colonial Women (London, 1983),
21. P. Barr, The Memsahibs. The Women of Victorian India (London, 1976),
22. M. MacMillan, Women of the Raj (London, 1988),
23. M. L. Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London, 1991),
24. M. Strobel, European Women and the Second British Empire (Bloomington, 1991),
25. J. Trollope, Britannia's Daughters: Women of the British Empire (London, 1983).
26. IOR (PELA): Medical Certificates 1843. [Case of Private William W.].
27. IOR: Letter from Medical Board to Government of Madras, 8.1.1821, 13; Military Letter from Madras, 3.4.1821. [Case of Private John S.].
28. IOR: Letter from Medical Board to Government of Madras, 8.1.1821, 1; Military Letter from Madras, 3.4.1821. [Case of Mr W. P.].
29. IOR: Letter from Medical Board to Government of Madras, 8.1.1821, 10; Military Letter from Madras, 3.4.1821. [Case of Private John M.].
30. IOR (PELA): Medical Certificates 1867-1870. [Case of Alexander W.].
31. IOR (PELA): Medical Certificates 1876-1878. [Case of Sub-Conductor Robert W.].
32. IOR (PELA): Medical Certificates 1846. [Case of Private Thomas C.].
33. IOR: Letter from Medical Board to Government of Madras, 8.1.1821, 6; Military Letter from Madras, 3.4.1821. [Case of Mrs E. M. S.].
34. IOR: Letter from Medical Board to Government of Madras, 8.1.1821, 7; Military Letter from Madras, 3.4.1821. [Case of Mrs Catherine D.].
35. Intemperance, insanity and crime were also seen to be linked. It was unacceptable that a person should 'be exempted from Criminal responsibility by reason of any temporary incapacity, which he shall have wilfully incurred by intoxication or other means'. IOR: Minute by I. D. Bethune, 30 June 1848; Minutes of the Rev Jud Leg Committee, 1851, No. 30.
36. For medical and other treatment within European asylums in British India, see Ernst, Mad Tales from the Raj, pp. 143-60.
37. In fact, feminist doctors (such as the cardiologist M. J. Legato) have recently come to demand that men and women ought to undergo medical treatment which is gender-specific, as women's bodies are identified as working differently from men's. See for examples E. Ettorre and E. Riska, Gendered Moods. Psychotropics and Society (London and New York, 1995),
38. NIH Guidelines on the Inclusion of Women and Minorities as Subjects of Clinical Research, Federal Register, Part VIII (Washington, 1994),
39. and The Commonwealth Fund's Survey of Women's Health (New York, 1993).
40. W. A. F. Browne, 'What Asylums were, are, and ought to be' [1837], in A. Scull (ed.) The Asylum as Utopia. W. A. F. Browne and the Mid-Nineteenth Century Consolidation of Psychiatry (London and New York, 1991), pp. 229-30.
41. Browne, 'What Asylums were, are, and ought to be', p. 230.
42. IOR: Rules for the future management and control of the Insane Hospitals; Bg Jud Proc, 28 Aug. 1818, 55. Assistant Surgeon F. P. Strong, Rasapagla Asylum (India) mentioned spinning, weaving, cleaning, gardening, cultivation. The asylum inmates were said to have raised 'coffee, cotton, sugar-cane, anuath, mulberry, casaiva, tapioca, sapan-wood, alva plant'. Apparently 'their coffee in 1832 was highly approved by the London brokers'. IOR: Summary of Correspondence relating to the Calcutta Asylum for Insane Patients, 30 Oct. 1847; B. Coll., 1852, 2494, 141.296, 52.
43. IOR: Medical Board to Govt., 6 June 1821; Bg Jud Prov, 21 Aug. 1821, 4, no para.
44. IOR: Asylum Report, 31 March 1852, in Med B to Govt, 24 May 1853; Bm Pub Proc, 9 July 1853, 4537, 76.
45. W. Ernst, 'The Establishment of "Native Lunatic Asylums" in Early Nineteenth-Century British India', in G. J. Meulenbeld and D. Wujastyk (ed.) Studies on Indian Medical History (Groningen, 1987), pp. 196, 200.
46. IOR: Medical Board to Govt., 6 June 1821; Bg Jud Proc, 21 Aug. 1821, 4, no para. Asylum Report, 31 March 1852, in Med B to Govt, 24 May 1853; Bm Pub Proc, 9 July 1853, 4537, 76.
47. IOR: Asylum Report, 14 June 1856, Bg Pub Proc, 24 June 1856, 52, n. para. For a discussion of mechanical restraint in British India, see Ernst, Mad Tales from the Raj, pp. 152-5.
48. Ernst, Mad Tales from the Raj, 152-5. Ibid.
49. See for example S. Mills, 'Knowledge, Gender, and Empire', in A. Blunt and G. Rose (eds.) Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies (New York, 1994), p. 34.
50. K. Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class under the Raj. Imperial Attitudes and Policies and their Critics, 1793-1905 (London, 1980).
51. R. O'Hanlon, 'Cultures of Rule, Communities of Resistance: Gender, Discourse and Tradition in Recent South Asian Historiographies', Social Analysis, 23 (1989), 94-114, p. 106.
52. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983).
53. D. Arnold, 'European Orphans and Vagrants in India in the Nineteenth Century', Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 7 (1979), 106-14.
54. A. L. Stoler, 'Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule', Comparative Studies in Society and History, 31 (1989), 134-60.
55. IOR: Table shewing the number of public patients treated in the Lunatic Asylum at Bhowanipore, and the results from 1 January 1824 to 30 December 1850, 10 March 1951; Bg Pub Proc, 24 June 1852, 7. It should be stressed that the admission rate does not reflect an 'incidence rate' of lunacy in British India.
56. For example 12 men, no women in 1839; 8 men, 1 woman in 1840; 15 men, 3 women in 1841; 5 men, no women in 1842; 20 men, 2 women in 1843; 15 men, 1 woman in 1859; 27 men, no women in 1860; 17 men, 1 woman in 1861; 9 men, 2 woman in 1862; 8 men, 4 women in 1863; 10 men, 7 women in 1864. IOR (PELA): compiled from Medical Certificates, 1830-1889, Registers of Admissions 1845-1892, and Miscellaneous Correspondence and Numerical Returns of Patients, 1857-1865.
57. 75 men, 5 women in 1838; 112 men, 10 women in 1859; 122 men, 15 women in 1865; 122 men, 10 women in 1882; 63 men, 13 women in 1892. Ibid.
58. European asylum patients in Bengal: 82 men, 3 women; in Madras: 40 men, 1 woman; in Bombay: 32 men, 4 women. IOR: Annual Administration and Progress Report on the Insane Asylum in the Bombay Presidency (Bombay, 1875), para. 39.
59. For example, the combined military strength of the Company and Crown are given as 45,000 Europeans before the rebellion of 1857 (Smith, p. 679, Spear, p. 278); 38,000 Europeans in 1857 (Smith, p. 666); 13,000 European Army in 1858 (Spear, p. 278); 76,000 British Army in 1861 (Roberts, p. 391); 65,000 Europeans in 1863 (Spear, p. 278, Smith, p. 679). Interpretation of these numbers, too, is problematic because: the army in India consisted largely of infantry and cavalry (its size could therefore fluctuate rapidly as its budget was increased or decreased); restructuring of the army (for example in 1859); deficit in soldiers during times of temporary deployment of troops to other countries (for example America); high death and casualty rates, especially during times of war (for example annexation of Sind, Burma): P. E. Roberts, History of British India under the Company and the Crown (London, 1953 [comp. by T. G. P. Spear]),
60. V. A. Smith, The Oxford History of India (Oxford, 1956),
61. P. Spear, India: A Modern History (Ann Arbor, 1972). Shortly after the Indian revolt, in 1861, the English population in India was 125,945. Of these only about 41,862 were civilians as compared with about 84,083 military servants. Of the 41,862, 22,556 were male and 19,306 were female. Of the women 8,356 were 'wives', 1,146 were 'widows', and 1,001 were unmarried.
62. Royal Commission on the Sanitary State . . ., Vol. 1, p. xxiv.
63. IOR: Table shewing number, p. 7.
64. Table shewing number, 7. Ibid.
65. See W. Ernst, 'Psychiatry and Colonialism: The Treatment of European Lunatics in British India, 1800-1858' (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1986), especially pp. 71-142.
66. Ballhatchet, Race, Sex, and Class under the Raj, pp. 96-122.
67. IOR: Table shewing number, p. 7.
68. Table shewing number, 7. Ibid.
69. Similar considerations were at play in regard to the Irish situation where asylums constituted a means of relief for hard-pressed families during times of famine and economic hardship. See M. Finnane, Insanity and the Insane in Post-Famine Ireland (London, 1981)
70. and M. Finnane, 'Asylums, Families and the State', History Workshop, 20 (1985), 134-8.
71. Proof of statistical significance is problematic in regard to some of the above figures anyway because of the low number of women involved. For example, the total number of female first-class patients was merely 14, and the number of cases cured too low (N=2) to allow testing for statistical significance. Of course, statistical significance does not necessarily map directly on to actual or material prominence.
72. IOR: Report Surg Gen to Govt, 4 Sept. 1874, in Annual Administration and Progress Report of the Insane Asylums in the Bombay Presidency, 1874, p. 3;
73. and 4th Annual Report on the Lunatic Asylum, Amraoti, 1880.
74. IOR: Charge of E.C. Z. by Sup Indian Navy, Bombay, 9 Nov. 1839; Bm Castle Marine Proc, 1840, 6.
75. IOR: Sec to Govt, Bombay, 1 Jan. 1840; ibid.
76. IOR (PELA): Medical Certificates 1845. [Case of E.C. Z.]. 13 Dec. 1844. See also Ernst, Mad Tales from the Raj, pp. 113-17;
77. Ernst and Kantowsky, 'The Records of Pembroke House and Ealing Lunatic Asylum'.
78. IOR: Ms. Photo.Eur.97, [A soldier's diary, 26 July 1847].
79. Ibid.
80. IOR: Ms. Eur.E.339. 'My Dear Mother . . . if for ever o a due, sell not my ole close'. Gunner John Luck's Letters from India, 1839-1844.
81. J. Busfield, 'Mental Illness as Social Product or Social Construct: A Contradiction in Feminists' Arguments?', Sociology of Health and Illness, 10 (1988), 521-42,
82. J. Busfield, 'The Female Malady? Men, Women and Madness in Nineteenth-Century Britain', Sociology, 28 (1994), 259-77,
83. N. Tomes, 'Feminist Histories of Psychiatry', in M. Micale and R. Porter (eds.) Discovering the History of Psychiatry (New York and Oxford, 1994),
84. N. Tomes, 'Historical Perspectives on Women and Mental Illness', in R. Apple (ed.) Women, Health, and Medicine in America: A Historical Handbook (New York, 1990), pp. 157-66.
85. For example, in regard to patients admitted to Pembroke House, and the Royal India Asylum at Ealing, a variety of physical conditions was mentioned, such as Delirium Tremens (16 per cent), sunstroke (15.3 per cent), general or partial paralysis (12.3 per cent), fever (9.8 per cent), stomach and intestinal troubles (9.2 per cent), fall, shot or blow to the head (8.6 per cent), epilepsy (8 per cent). (Data compiled from IOR (PELA): Medical Certificates and Medical Case Books.)
86. IOR (PELA): Medical Certificates 1860. [Case of Seaman Charles C.]
87. For the connection between various physical diseases and mental illness see M. Weiss, 'The Interrelationship of Tropical Disease and Mental Disorder: Conceptual Framework and Literature Review', Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 9 (1985), pp. 121-200.
88. Cholera, for example accounted between 1830 and 1846 for about 10 per cent of deaths among the British in Bombay, and between 1818 and 1854 killed more than 8,500 British soldiers. See Royal Commission on the Sanitary State of the Army in India (London, 1863), p. xv,
89. and D. Arnold, 'Cholera and Colonialism in British India', Past and Present, 113 (1986), p. 127.
90. Royal Commission on the Sanitary State of the Army in India (London, 1863), p. xv.
91. Busfield, 'The Female Malady?', p. 271.
92. See for an example the case of Captain B. in Ernst and Kantowsky, 'The Records of Pembroke House and Ealing Lunatic Asylum'.
93. The existence of a female malady in the nineteenth century has been substantiated neither by Brookes for New Zealand, Busfield for England, Ernst for British India, Finnane for Ireland, Fox for California, Garton for New South Wales, nor by Tomes for North America. See B. Brookes, 'Women and Madness: A Case Study of the Seacliff Asylum, 1890-1920', in B. Brookes, C. Macdonald and M. Tennant (eds.) Women in History, vol. 2 (Wellington, 1992), 129-47;
94. Busfield, 'The Female Malady?'; Finnane, Insanity and the Insane in Post-Famine Ireland, London, 1981;
95. Finnane, 'Asylums, Families and the State', 134-8,
96. R. W. Fox, So Far Disordered in Mind: Insanity in California, 1870-1930 (Berkeley, 1978),
97. S. Garton, Medicine and Madness. A Social History of Insanity in New South Wales, 1880-1940 (Sydney, 1988),
98. Tomes, 'Historical Perspectives on Women and Mental Illness', 154-8.
99. P. N. Stearns, 'Working-Class Women in Britain, 1890-1914', in M. Vicinus (ed.) Suffer and Be Still. Women in the Victorian Age (Bloomington, 1972), 100-21.
100. G. Cheney, The English Malady or a Treatise on Nervous Diseases of all Kinds (London, [1733]), ed. Roy Porter (London, 1990).
101. Skultans, English Madness, p. 26.
102. I. K. Zola, 'Medicine as an Institution of Social Control', in C. Cox and A. Mead (eds.) A Sociology of Medical Practice (London, 1975), p. 170.
103. A. Miles, Women, Health and Medicine (Milton Keynes, 1991), p. 182,
104. W. R. Gove and F. Tudor, 'Adult Sex Roles and Mental Illness', American Journal of Sociology, 78 (1973), 812-35.
105. L. Prior, The Social Organization of Mental Illness (London, 1993), p. 141.
106. Busfield, 'The Female Malady?', p. 270.
107. D. Armstrong, 'The Rise of Surveillance Medicine', Sociology of Health and Illness, 17 (1995), pp. 393, 401.
108. Miles, Women, Health and Medicine, pp. 183-206.
109. K. Sangari and S. Vaid (eds.), Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History (Delhi, 1989 and New Brunswick, 1990), p. 3.
110. Judith Bennet, quoted in N. Chaudhuri and M. Strobel (eds) Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington, 1992), p. 4.
111. E. Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978).
112. F. Barker, P. Hulme, and M. Iversen (eds) Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory (Manchester, 1994),
113. A. Brah, 'Time, Place, and Others: Discourses of Race, Nation, and Ethnicity. Review Essay', Sociology, 28 (1994), 805-13,
114. J. Fabian, Time and the Work of Anthropology. Critical Essays 1971-91 (Chur, 1991);
115. R. Guha (ed.) Subaltern Studies, vol. VI (Delhi, 1989),
116. R. Kabbani, Europe's Myths of Orient: Devise and Rule (London, 1986),
117. R. O'Hanlon, 'Recovering the Subject: "Subaltern Studies" and Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia', Modern Asian Studies, 22 (1988), 189-224,
118. R. O'Hanlon and D. Washbrook, 'After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third World', Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34 (1992), 141-67;
119. G. Prakash, 'Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography', Comparative Studies in Society and History, 32 (1990), 383-408;
120. R. J. C. Young, Colonial Desire. Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London and New York, 1995).
121. Anderson, Imagined Communities,
122. Fabian, The Time and the Work of Anthropology, E. Hobsbawn and T. Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983),
123. N. Thomas, Colonialism Culture. Anthropology, Travel and Government (Cambridge, 1994),
124. Stoler, 'Rethinking Colonial Categories'.
125. See for example J. Oppenheimer, 'Shattered Nerves'. Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England (New York, 1991);
126. M. Micale, 'Hysteria Male/Hysteria Female. Reflections on Comparative Gender Construction in Nineteenth-Century France and Britain', in M. Benjamin (ed.) Science and Sensibility: Gender and Scientific Enquiry, 1780-1945 (Cambridge, 1991), 200-39.
127. O'Hanlon, 'Recovering the Subject', p. 212.
128. Roy Porter, quoted on back-cover of Showalter's book.
129. R. Porter and M. S. Micale (eds.) 'Introduction: Reflections on Psychiatry and Its Histories', in Micale and Porter, Discovering the History of Psychiatry, p. 26. Porter and Micale's statement refers to the quote at the beginning of their chapter: 'History is a tale told about the past in the present for present purposes'
130. (P. Ricoeur, The Narrative Function, 1979).
131. See for bibliographic references the many examples cited in Kabbani, Europe's Myths of Orient,
132. S. Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago, 1992),
133. Young, Colonial Desire.
134. For the workings of metropolitan colonialism, see M. Hechter, Internal Colonialism. The Celtic Fringe in British National Development (London, 1975),
135. and T. Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain (London, 1981).
136. Busfield suggests an 'increasing diversification of medical categories of madness in which assumptions of gender are embedded'. See Busfield, 'The Female Malady?', p. 276.
137. Micale points at national differences in the way in which gender and psychiatry were constructed. See Micale, 'Hysteria Male/Hysteria Female'. The course of conceptually and empirically grounded localized theories and historically specific accounts is also taken by people working on racialisation, nationalism, and cultural studies and anthropology.
138. See for examples J. Solomos and L. Back, 'Conceptualising Racisms: Social Theory, Politics and Research', Sociology, 28 (1994), 143-61,
139. Thomas, Colonialism's Culture;
140. Fabian, Time and the Work of Anthropology,
141. Brah, 'Time, Place, and Others'.
142. Tomes, 'Feminist Histories of Psychiatry', footnote 97.