Psychological symptoms and medical responses in nineteenth-century India

Abstract

The article documents medical approaches to mental illness in mid- to late-nineteenth-century India through examining the Indian Medical Gazette and other medical accounts. By the late nineteenth century, psychiatry in Europe moved from discussions around asylum-based care to a nuanced and informed debate about the nature of mental symptoms. This included ideas on phrenology and craniometry, biological and psycho-social causes, physical and drug treatments, many of which travelled to India. Simultaneously, indigenous socio-medical ideas were being debated. From the early to the mid-nineteenth century, not much distinction was made between the Western and the native ‘mind’, and consequently the diagnosis and investigation of mental symptoms did not differ. However, by the late nineteenth century Western medicine considered the ‘Western mind’ as more civilized and sophisticated than the ‘native mind.