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This book focuses on the Ranchi Indian Mental Hospital, the largest public psychiatric facility in colonial India during the 1920s and 1930s. It breaks new ground by offering unique material for a critical engagement with the phenomenon of the ‘indigenisation’ or ‘Indianisation’ of the colonial medical services and the significance of international professional networks. The work also provides a detailed assessment of the role of gender and race in this field, and of Western and culturally specific medical treatments and diagnoses. The volume offers an unprecedented look at both the local and global factors that had a strong bearing on hospital management and psychiatric treatment at this institution.
What role does gender play in scientific research and the development of technologies? This book provides methodological expertise, research experiences and empirical findings in the dynamic field of Science and Technology Studies. The authors, coming from computer science, social sciences, or cultural studies of science, discuss how to ask questions about gender and give examples for the application in interdisciplinary research, development and teaching. Topics range from the design of information and communication technologies, epistemologies of biology and chemistry to teaching mathematics and professional processes in engineering. Contributions by Anne Balsamo, Wendy Faulkner, Rebecca Jordan-Young, Barbara Orland, Els Rommes, and others.
Considering cases from Europe to India, this collection brings together current critical research into the role played by racial issues in the production of medical knowledge. Confronting such controversial themes as colonialism and medicine, the origins of racial thinking and health and migration, the distinguished contributors examine the role played by medicine in the construction of racial categories.
This fascinating volume tackles the history of the terms 'normal' and 'abnormal'. Originally meaning 'as occurring in nature', normality has taken on significant cultural gravitas and this book recognizes and explores that fact. The essays engage with the concepts of the normal and the abnormal from the perspectives of a variety of academic disciplines – ranging from art history to social history of medicine, literature, and science studies to sociology and cultural anthropology. The contributors use as their conceptual anchors the works of moral and political philosophers such as Canguilhem, Foucault and Hacking, as well as the ideas put forward by sociologists including Durkheim and Illich. With contributions from a range of scholars across differing disciplines, this book will have a broad appeal to students in many areas of history.
This book brings together current critical research into medical pluralism during the last two centuries. It includes a rich selection of historical, anthropological and sociological case studies.
This book offers the first systematic critical appraisal of the uses of work and work therapy in psychiatric institutions across the globe, from the late eighteenth to the end of the twentieth century. Contributors explore the daily routine in psychiatric institutions and ask whether work was therapy, part of a regime of punishment or a means of exploiting free labour. By focusing on mental patients’ day-to-day life in closed institutions, the authors fill a gap in the history of psychiatric regimes. The geographical scope is wide, ranging from Northern America to Japan, India and Western as well as Eastern Europe, and the authors engage with broad historical questions, such as the impact of colonialism and communism and the effect of the World Wars. The book presents an alternative history of the emergence of occupational therapy and will be of interest not only to academics in the fields of history and sociology but also to health professionals.
The medicalisation of alcohol use has become a prominent discourse that guides policy makers and impacts public perceptions of alcohol and drinking. This book maps the historical and cultural dimensions of the phenomenon. Emphasising medical attitudes and theories regarding alcohol and the changing perception of alcohol consumption in psychiatry and mental health, it explores the shift from the use of alcohol in clinical treatment and as part of dietary regimens to the emergence of alcoholism as a disease category that requires medical intervention and is considered a threat to public health.
‘Mad Tales from the Raj’ is an authoritative assessment of western psychiatry within the context of British colonialism. This revised version provides a comprehensive study of official attitudes and practices in relation to both Indian and European patients during the dominance of the British East India Company. It is fascinating reading not only to students of colonial history, medical sociology and related disciplines, but to all those with a general interest in life in the colonies.
This book offers something new in the history of psychiatry. Within a transnational research framework, it presents original historical case studies and conceptual reflections on comparative and related methodologies. Systematic comparison and transfer studies as well as aspects of entangled history are employed in relation to themes such as different cultural meanings pertaining to the same term; transfer of treatment practices and institutional regimes; localised practices and (re)-emerging forms of patient care; circulation of early anti-psychiatrists’ views; impact of war and politics on patients’ welfare and on psychiatric discourse; and diversification of psychotherapeutic and phys...
Breaks new ground in the history of psychiatry by focusing on the role of work in mental-health institutions.