![]() ![]() ![]() The materials drawn upon include medical text books, contemporary periodicals, literary and non-literary printed books of British India, Annual Reports of lunatic asylums, medical certificates, and Certificates of admission. The essay concludes with a study of case histories from asylums in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras where white women patients - generally of the lower social orders - who suffered from 'major' mental illness, were incarcerated. The gendered traumas of war and their psychological fallout too are touched upon.Shifting focus to the Lunatic Asylums of British India, we study the Bhowanipore whites only asylum. Showalter argues that the cultural association of madness and femininity is a nineteenth-century development. It explores some of the manifestations of chronic female mental disorders that could be discerned among white women in colonial Indian society, including neurasthenia, and hysteria. The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830-1980. This paper begins by examining some of the contemporary gendered theories on psychiatry by examining prominent metropolitan medical hand-books on psychiatry. As a topic, the white woman's mental health is under-researched in colonial psychiatry and colonial gender studies. ABSTRACT This important essay looks at white female mental health in the British Raj in the second half of the nineteenth century. ![]()
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