Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Re-Constructing’ Indian Medicine: The Role of Caste in Late Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century India
- 2 The Resurgence of Indigenous Medicine in the Age of the HIV/AIDS Pandemic: South Africa Beyond the ‘Miracle’
- 3 Medicine, Medical Knowledge and Healing at the Cape of Good Hope: Khoikhoi, Slaves and Colonists
- 4 Dealing with Disease: Epizootics, Veterinarians and Public Health in Colonial Bengal, 1850–1920
- 5 Mahatma Gandhi under the Plague Spotlight
- 6 Plague Hits the Colonies: India and South Africa at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
- 7 The Blind Men and the Elephant: Imperial Medicine, Medieval Historians and the Role of Rats in the Historiography of Plague
- 8 Physicians, Forceps and Childbirth: Technological Intervention in Reproductive Health in Colonial Bengal
- 9 Not Fit for Punishment: Diagnosing Criminal Lunatics in Late Nineteenth-Century British India
- 10 Multiple Voices and Plausible Claims: Historiography and Colonial Lunatic Asylum Archives
- 11 Death and Empire: Legal Medicine in the Colonization of India and Africa
- Notes
- Index
10 - Multiple Voices and Plausible Claims: Historiography and Colonial Lunatic Asylum Archives
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Re-Constructing’ Indian Medicine: The Role of Caste in Late Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century India
- 2 The Resurgence of Indigenous Medicine in the Age of the HIV/AIDS Pandemic: South Africa Beyond the ‘Miracle’
- 3 Medicine, Medical Knowledge and Healing at the Cape of Good Hope: Khoikhoi, Slaves and Colonists
- 4 Dealing with Disease: Epizootics, Veterinarians and Public Health in Colonial Bengal, 1850–1920
- 5 Mahatma Gandhi under the Plague Spotlight
- 6 Plague Hits the Colonies: India and South Africa at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
- 7 The Blind Men and the Elephant: Imperial Medicine, Medieval Historians and the Role of Rats in the Historiography of Plague
- 8 Physicians, Forceps and Childbirth: Technological Intervention in Reproductive Health in Colonial Bengal
- 9 Not Fit for Punishment: Diagnosing Criminal Lunatics in Late Nineteenth-Century British India
- 10 Multiple Voices and Plausible Claims: Historiography and Colonial Lunatic Asylum Archives
- 11 Death and Empire: Legal Medicine in the Colonization of India and Africa
- Notes
- Index
Summary
The flimsy line between historical fact and fiction – between accurate summary of the contents of an archive and the construction of a gripping tale – is at the centre of the historian's craft. The choice of focus and angle, spotlight and commentary, make the difference between overwhelming detail and pattern, repetition and forward movement. Historians' choices, as they lead their audience through a sequence of ‘facts’, are weighty matters: the most mundane of detail, such as the price of a cake of soap in 1897, becomes significant in a story about – for example – gender, laundry and household budgets.
This chapter addresses the narrative truths and fictions of colonial asylum histories, and the significant challenges posed by their archival traces. It is partly an exploration of the complexity and ethics of writing about the everyday lives of the insane; it also explores the discursive structures that continue to shape scholarship in this area, and the effects these have on interpretations of the archive.
Patricia Allderidge sketches the shape of the problem in an article about historians' willingness to perpetuate a certain kind of spectacular history in relation to the Bethlem Royal Hospital, without ever consulting primary sources. She notes:
I have therefore come to the conclusion that, on the whole, historians of psychiatry actually do not want to know about Bethlem as a historical fact because Bethlem as a reach-me-down historical cliché is far more useful …
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Medicine and ColonialismHistorical Perspectives in India and South Africa, pp. 143 - 158Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014