Lunatic asylums: A business of profit during the colonial empire in India

The knowledge about "maladies of the mind" was in the early stages of development and far from being considered as medical conditions till the mid-19^th century. Around this period, the British began to establish "Native-Only" lunatic asylums in India, particularly in the Bengal Presidency of their colonial empire. These institutions were primarily meant to provide custodial care and to rehabilitate those creating nuisance, particularly the wanderers and vagrants. However, these facilities turned into forced labor houses producing goods for the British Empire in the name of treatment. As traders, the British amassed India's wealth in several ways, and the establishment of lunatic asylums for the natives was one of the profit-making businesses. Undercover of Victorian morality, the reports of medical treatment had evolved into profit margin data. This article explores some of the obscure facts of British colonial rule in regards to mental health.

Scurvy on sea and land: political economy and natural history, c. 1780-c. 1850

From the late eighteenth century, the ways in which scurvy was understood changed in consequence of the abandonment of humoral pathology and the adoption of a new causal framework informed by nervous physiology. Although there was some narrowing of the etiological framework around dietary deficiency in the wake of the navy's success with the issue of citrus juices, this was rarely to the exclusion of predisposing causes such as fatigue, weather and flagging spirits. Within the navy, the persistence of a multi-factoral framework was relatively unproblematic, for the standard issue of citrus juices and improvements in victualling occurred at the same time as other important reforms in naval health. But outside the navy it was a different matter. In other institutional settings, the continuing belief in the importance of factors other than diet created tensions between medical officers and administrators who found such inclusive views politically inconvenient. After a brief survey of the principal changes in the physiology of scurvy, this article examines how the problem of scurvy was understood, not only in the navy but also in the armies of the East India Company and in British prisons. These were not the only contexts in which scurvy caused concern, but they serve to illustrate the fact that it remained a complex and controversial disease. The article shows how different medical cultures and institutional imperatives took the natural history of scurvy in different directions.