5A Hashimoto
Session Title: History of Psychiatry
Session Organizer: Akira HASHIMOTO (Aichi Prefectural University)
Chair: TBA
1) Akira HASHIMOTO (Aichi Prefectural University)
Waterfalls and Hot Springs: The Genealogy and Development of Traditional
Japanese Remedies for the Mentally Ill
2) Wen-Ji WANG (National Yang-Ming University)
A Project of Readjustment: Neurasthenia and Psy Disciplines in late
Republican China
3) Theodore Jun YOO (University of Hawai`i at Manoa)
“The Suicidal Person:” The Medicalization and Gendering of Suicide in
Colonial Korea
4) Naofumi YOSHIDA (Toho University School of Medicine & Waseda University)
French Psychiatry in Cambodia: Madness and Confinement
Akira HASHIMOTO is Professor at the Department of Social Welfare, Aichi
Prefectural University, Japan. He received his PhD (Doctor of Health
Sciences) from the University of Tokyo in 1992 and studied on a German
Exchange Service scholarship at the University of Düsseldorf, Germany
(1992-94). He is currently researching the comparative history of psychiatry
in Asia and Europe between the 19th and the 20th century. Recent books
include: "The place of treatment and the history of psychiatry" (Tokyo,
2011), "The mentally ill and the home custody in modern Japan" (Tokyo, 2012).
Wen-Ji WANG is Associate Professor and Director of the Institute of
Science, Technology and Society at National Yang-Ming University,
Taiwan. After doctoral work in history of psychoanalysis at the
University of Cambridge, he published several articles on leprosy in
colonial Taiwan. His current research project is on the development of
mental hygiene and psychiatry in Republican China.
Theodore Jun Yoo is an Associate Professor of History at the University
of Hawai`i at Manoa. He is the author of The Politics of Gender in Colonial
Korea: Education, Labor, and Health, 1910–1945 (University of California
Press, 2008). He is currently completing a manuscript entitled Gender and
Madness: The Politics of Care in Korea which looks at the social and cultural
construction of madness from the premodern up to the postwar period.
Naofumi Yoshida is an assistant professor at the Toho University School
of Medicine’s Department of Neuropsychiatry and a PhD candidate in cultural
anthropology at Waseda University’s Graduate School of Letters, Arts and
Sciences. His research field is medical anthropology and cultural psychiatry.
His research theme is the transition of the concept of mental illness in
Cambodia. He carried out fieldwork in Cambodia for one year, ending in
September 2011. He is a medical doctor and currently works as the head of
the Acute Care Psychiatric Ward at Tokyo Adachi Hospital. In this paper
he focuses on the process of establishing the institutional psychiatry in
the Cambodian French Colonial Era.
“The Suicidal Person:” The Medicalization and Gendering of Suicide in
Colonial Korea
Theodore Jun Yoo, University of Hawai`i at Manoa
This paper examines the changing popular attitudes toward chasal (suicide)
under Japanese colonial rule. Between 1910 and 1942, the Government-General
of Chōsen reported a total of 54,053 completed suicides among Koreans.
It
seeks to examine the reactions towards suicide, especially the cultural,
politico-legal, medical and socio-economic reasons offered to explain why
people killed themselves. More than the collation of raw numbers, urban
interlocutors sought to explain how mental or emotional distress could be
caused
by
physical
and
moral
factors,
challenging
traditional
interpretations, which insisted that suicide was a voluntary act. In
particular, it will explore gendered explanations and societal stressors
such as early marriage, male infidelity, financial losses, unrequited love,
physical illness, and the likes, which was said to trigger suicidal
tendencies in people.
At the same time, the pathologization of deviant
behavior as a neurological disorder, contributed to a broader discourse
on suicide as a measure of social health, which placed people’s lives under
increasing scrutiny. This paper shows how these discursive colonial
representations of suicide came to shape understandings and practices of
suicidal behavior in colonial Korea.
French Psychiatry in Cambodia: Madness and Confinement
Naofumi Yoshida 1)2)
1) Department of Neuropsychiatry, Toho University School of Medicine
2) Graduate School of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Waseda University
This paper describes French psychiatry in Cambodia. The purpose of this
research is to clarify the reason and process for the establishment of
Takhmau Psychiatric Hospital in Cambodia’s Kandal province in the French
colonial era. It was the first psychiatric hospital in Cambodia, and it
is well-known among the Cambodian population. In fact, it has acquired the
nickname
Pet
Chhkhout
(Hospital
of
Madness).
The
1838
psychiatric
hospitalization law establishing asylum psychiatry as the sole legal model
for cases of insanity in France was applied in Indochina in 1930. The law
permits the administrative authority to confine a psychotic patient to a
psychiatric hospital.
A few books about French colonial medicine have been published (Guillou
2009, Oversen and Trankell 2010, Au 2011), but no research is available
on the psychiatric field in French colonial Cambodia. Generally, French
colonialism was publicized as une mission civilisatrice—a self-imposed
assignment to bring the colonial populations within the orbit of French
civilization. The notion of la mission civilisatrice was promoted during
the 1880s, and it introduced medical and educational programs for the native
populations of the colonies. In the early twentieth century, although there
were provincial hospitals in several provinces, the Mixed Hospital in Phnom
Penh was the only fully equipped hospital in Cambodia. If a case of alienation
mentale came to the hospital, a medical doctor or medical assistant would
examine the patient. However, there was no psychiatrist and no psychiatric
hospital, and the act of confinement was not legally authorized at that
time.
Archival sources, such as Fonds de la Résidence supérieure du Cambodge,
Journal official du Cambodge, and Journal official de l’Indochine Française,
are available at the Archives National du Cambodge in Phnom Penh. From the
1900s to the 1920s, several alienation mentale cases were reported in Fonds
de la Résidence supérieure du Cambodge. After Cambodian criminal law was
amended
in
the
early
1930s,
mental
examinations
were
performed
to
distinguish psychiatric patients from rational men. Eventually, Takhmau
Psychiatric
Hospital
was
established
in
1940;
subsequently,
the
administrative authority began to confine psychiatric patients in this
psychiatric hospital.