Working Bodies, Mending Minds: Mental Illness and the History of Labor in French Colonial Vietnam

• In Event: 132. Putting Bodies to Work: New Directions in the History of Colonial Medicine in Southeast Asia

Abstract

This paper examines the history of labor as a kind of therapy in mental hospitals in French colonial Vietnam. Drawing on the principles of moral treatment and inspired by experiments with agricultural colonies in the Dutch East Indies, colonial psychiatrists in Vietnam put their patients to work, arguing that the best way to recalibrate the disordered mind was through the orderly discipline of the body. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, asylum administrators continually stressed the special therapeutic value of labor even as the scale and intensity of patient labor deepened in the struggle for economic profit. For historians of psychiatry, these coercive aspects of patient labor serve as powerful reminders of the abuses of the asylum system. Yet the dynamics of patient labor itself – the kind of work patients did and how it was organized, what they did and whether they were compensated – tends to be disregarded in the literature. By taking patient labor seriously as a worthwhile subject in itself, I show how the agricultural colony was a site for discipline as well as a model of capitalist production which responded to the dynamics of a largely agrarian, plantation economy that promoted the intensification of labor. Drawing on annual asylum reports, the notes from study trips and the proceedings of international scientific conferences, this paper argues that the history of asylum patient labor must be integrated into the history of wider labor relations in the region during the interwar period.

Author

• Claire Edington, University of California, San Diego