Beyond the asylum

Claire Ellen Edington

This dissertation looks beyond the asylum to consider the development of psychiatry in French Indochina as the product of everyday exchanges between lay people and experts. Drawing on archival research conducted over two years in Vietnam and France - including hundreds of patient case files - I trace the movements of patients in and out of asylums and between prisons, poor houses, youth reformatories, hospitals and family homes. Together, these individual patient itineraries challenge our notion of the colonial asylum as a closed setting where patients rarely left, run by experts who enjoyed broad and unquestioned authority. Instead, they reveal how ideas about what it meant to be abnormal, as well as normal enough to return to social life, were debated between psychiatrists, colonial authorities and the public throughout the early decades of twentieth century. By examining the...