Ernst W
Department of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Southampton, UK.
Soc Hist Med. 1996 Dec;9(3):357-82. doi: 10.1093/shm/9.3.357.
The aim of this article is to explore whether gender was a linchpin in the construction of Europeans' mental health in nineteenth-century British India. A relational model of gender will be employed which places emphasis on the complementarity of men's and women's mental problems within the socio-economic, political and cultural confines of nineteenth-century colonialism. The postulate of a 'female malady' which has been promulgated in recent accounts of women's mental health will be shown to be inapplicable in the context of the raj. Instead a reading of the history of mental health in nineteenth-century British India will be suggested which sees different kinds of 'madness' coexisting alongside each other, merely incorporating assumptions about gender relations rather than exemplifying any one exclusively female construct of 'madness'. The primary sources will be female and male patients' case stories and statistics produced in European lunatic asylums in India and England.
本文旨在探究在19世纪的英属印度，性别是否是构建欧洲人心理健康观念的关键因素。我们将采用一种性别关系模型，该模型强调在19世纪殖民主义的社会经济、政治和文化背景下，男性和女性心理问题的互补性。近期有关女性心理健康的论述中所宣扬的“女性疾病”假设，在英属印度统治时期的背景下将被证明是不适用的。相反，本文将提出一种对19世纪英属印度心理健康史的解读，认为不同类型的“疯狂”彼此共存，只是融入了关于性别关系的假设，而非仅仅体现任何一种专门针对女性的“疯狂”概念。主要资料将是印度和英国欧洲精神病院里男性和女性患者的病例故事及统计数据。
