Sunrise: Draft Timeline for the
East
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about 6th century BC
Indian medical
classics
1407-1408 Vasco da Gama discovered the sea route from
Europe to
India, going round the "Cape of Good Hope" at the southern tip
of Africa.
Europeans no longer had to rely on the muslim powers of the
middle east for
access to far eastern goods.
1493 Following Columbus's discovery of America, Pope Alexander
6th
decreed that the non-European world east of the Azores (in
mid-Atlantic)
should belong to Portugal and Spain should have the world west
of the
Azores. His gift was conditional on their converting the
natives to
Christianity.
1502 The Portugese established the first European
settlement in
India, at Cochin.
1510 The Portuguese set up a permanent settlement in Velha Goa (or
Old Goa), beginning four and a half centuries of Portuguese rule in Goa,
ending 1961.
1530 Bombay acquired by Portugal. Passed to England in
1662
31.12.1600 British
East India Company established by a charter.
The map shows British India in the early 20th century. Pink
areas were
ruled directly by Britain. Light green areas were ruled by
Indian Princes
with allegiance to Britain. The few tiny dots of dark green
were
Portuguese.
1602 Foundation of the Dutch East India Company
1639 A site (Madras) on the east coast of India
granted to
the British East India Company by the Rajah of Chandragiri.
This was to
become the
chief seaport on the east coast and the capital of the Madras
Presidency. In 1969 Madras State was renamed Tamil Nadu, meaning
"Tamil country". In 1996 the name of the city changed from Madras to
Chennai. The southern end of modern India consists of Tamil Nadu on the
east and Kerala on the west.
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1662 Portugal gave the seaport of
Bombay to
England as part
of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza when she married Charles
2nd. It was
granted to the British East India Company in 1668. The
Presidency of
Bombay was established, with Bombay as its capital, in
1708. The State of Bombay was split into the two States of
Maharashtra and Gujarat by the Bombay Reorganisation Act 1960. Bombay city
became Mumbai in 1995. The name of the second city of Maharashtra
has been changed from Poona to Pune.
1664 Foundation of the French East India Company
1690 Job Charnock of the British East India Company
founded
Calcutta, which became the chief city of the province
of
Bengal and the capital of British India until January
1912, when
Delhi was made the capital.
Email 26.11.2006:
"This is to inform you that on your website you have mentioned
that Job
Charnock founded the city of Calcutta (Kolkata) in 1690 but this is
baseless and distorted history. You should have the information that on
16th May, 2003 the Honourable Kolkata High Court has dismissed the name of
Charnock as the city's founder and 24th August 1690 as its birthday. This
landmark verdict came after we on behalf of the Sabarna Roy Choudhury
Paribar Parishad and nine other intellectuals of the city filed a public
interest litigation. The verdict was based upon the findings of an expert
committee report headed by the famous historian late Sri Nemai Sadhan
Basu.
So we request you to clarify the information on your website immediately
and honour the judgment of the high court.
Devarshi Roy Choudhury
Joint Secretary
Sabarna Roy Choudhury Paribar Parishad
Kolkata, India.
http://www.devarshi.faithweb.com
http://www.sabarna.faithweb.com"
1747 "The first lunatic hospital for Europeans in
Bengal was
established sometime prior to 1747. It was privately owned"
(Ernst, W. 1988 p.51)
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18.1.1788 Captain Arthur Phillip of the British Royal
Navy, the
founder of European Australia, reached
Botany Bay.
with a consignment of convicts. Chosen in Britain as the
site for the penal colony, it seemed unsuitable on arrival,
and the colony
was set up at Port Jackson. They settled in Sydney Cove on
26.1.1788. Phillip had sailed from Portsmouth, England,
on
13.5.1787 with a fleet of eleven ships carrying about
1,350 people
(men, women and children). These included about 780 convicts
and four
companies of marines (soldiers). The government of New South
Wales was
initially military. A second fleet of convicts arrived in
1790, a
third in 1791.
1811 The Castle Hill Asylum, Sydney
was established to remove lunatics from the gaols. Its first medical
officer (1814-1815) was Dr William Bland (1789-1898), a pardoned
convict, transported
to Australia from India where he had killed a man in a dual.
(external link)
(external link)
(external link)
Rex Stubbs
"In 1811, Macquarie authorised the conversion of the Government
Farm into an asylum for the reception of convict lunatics. The Sydney
Gazette of 1st June, 1811, reported: His Excellency, commiserating the
unhappy condition of persons labouring under the affliction of mental
derangement, has been pleased to order an Asylum to be prepared for their
reception at Castle Hill, whither they have been accordingly removed from
their former place of confinement, which was in the town gaol at
Parramatta, and every provision that humanity could suggest has been made
for their accommodation and comfort.
The first Superintendent was the Rev. Samuel Marsden, who held office until
c1814, when George Suttor was appointed to the office. Mr. William Bennett
became Superintendent in 1819, holding the position until the Asylum closed
in 1826. The patients were moved to Liverpool. By 1818 the size of the land
had been reduced to 200 acres as the result of land grants.
The property was handed over to the Church and School Corporation in 1828."
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cholera 1816
"Dr Barnes. who had medical charge of the district of Jessore
in
Bengal
from 1810 to 1822, but who was absent in part of the years 1816
and 1817 when the disease assumed the epidemic character... considered it
from the first as a disease peculiar to that country and previously
unknown, which had superseded the periodical remittent fever formerly so
prevalent.
If the annual storms of violent thunder, lightning, wind, and rain
commenced early in March, and recurred at short intervals until the rainy
season began, the hot season (April, May, June) was, he says, comparatively
healthy, and conversely: if the rains broke up at the end of August, and
the waters sank rapidly during September, the
cholera commenced its attack at the beginning of October,
carrying death and desolation among the inhabitants until the middle of
December, when the disease in a short time became apparently extinct.
Instead of the usual rainy and dry season, scarcely a week of 1816, in
Jessore, was without rain; the sun was constantly obscured; the atmosphere
close, heavy, moist; the thermometer from March to November ranging between
70 degrees and 95 degrees.
The crowded, ill-ventilated native huts are on mounds surrounded with pits,
which are the receptacles of stagnant water and of every kind of filth. Dr
Barnes asserts unhesitatingly that in these circumstances the Asiatic
epidemic was generated from the
exhalations arising from the
decomposition of animal and vegetable matter and the use of water
in which this process was continually going on. "These," he
emphatically declares, "were the sole cause of this disease""
(Farr, W. 25.7.1868, p.291)
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1834 South Australian Association established to found
a colony on
the principles of Edward Gibbon Wakefield. Adelaide, the
capital of
South Australia, was built in 1836. The separate colony of
South Australia
was formed and constituted in 1838, although Wakefield was not
directly
involved. The scheme of Gibbon Wakefield aiming at
establishing a wealthy
landlord class nearly ruined the colony by its failure.
"By 1834
Dr Edward Wright, in London, was a participant in movements to
set up a new colony (South Australia) as a 'paradise of dissent'. Middle-
class
religious dissenters were powerful in the colony's formation. Wright wanted
the job of colonial medical officer, but instead was given
a free passage [1836] and a lesser position as medical attendant to
the survey party.
He then appears to have had a private practice, though he seems to
have sent his (unqualified) son Charles out to do a lot of the work." He
was a nominal member of the Church of England, but "At public dinners he
would propose toasts to 'religious and civil liberty all over the world'
and he participated in groups opposed to the Governor's party".
[Politics may have been one of the reasons for conflict at
Bethlem]
read on
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1839 Self portrait of the Japanese artist, Katsushika Hokusai,
possibly born 31.10.1760 - died 10.5.1849)
The term manga (whimsical pictures) was used by
Hokusai (1760-1849) in
1814 to describe a collection of
his pictures.
By the 1940s it referred to comics or cartoons.
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1839 Opium War: The Chinese Government, wishing to prevent the
importation of opium into China, confiscated opium at Canton belonging to
British merchants. War with Britain followed. Fighting was ended by the
Treaty of Nanking in 1842 by which the British secured a lease on
Hong Kong and the ports of Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Nangpo and Shanghai were
opened to foreign trade.
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Doris Chang and Arthur
Kleinman argue that:
"Traditional Chinese theories of medicine did not consider
mental disorders separately from physical disorders, as their origins were
also
thought to be due to an imbalance of the internal organs. Thus, treatment
of
mental illness was largely somato-psychic in approach with the restoration
of
physiological function and balance as the primary goal. The designation of
mental illness as a separate field of study and treatment did not occur
until the
late 1800s, when foreign missionaries began establishing asylums for
the insane
in
China."
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6.6.1859 Queen Victoria signed Letters Patent separating the colony
of Queensland, Australia, from New South Wales.
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1863 Sunnyside Lunatic Asylum, Christchurch, New Zealand was the
first asylum in Christchurch. Its first patients were 17 people who had
previously been kept in the Lyttelton gaol. The first Superintendent
was Edward William Seager, who had been the first constable in Christchurch
in 1852. "He was highly regarded for his progressive thinking, care and
human touch
with his patients as was his wife. He made study tours back to England to
look at mental health developments
in the 1860s. (Email from Murray Cree 9.1.2013)
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1875: Three experienced members of London Yearly Meeting were sent
out in that year to investigate and to recommend measures to aid the
struggling Australian Meetings. J.J. Dymond,
William Beck and Alfred Wright left England on 19.9.1874, after
a farewell meeting 19.9.1874. (William Nicolle Oats 1982
Quakers in Australia in the Nineteenth Century)
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1876 Queen Victoria proclaimed Empress of India
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28.6.1892 Ralph Athelstane Noble born and educated in Sydney,
graduating in
medicine in 1916. Became a medical officer in the Department of Mental
Hospitals of New South Wales from 1916 to 1919. Then two years of general
practice. He went to Cambridge in 1921, took the DPM and worked at the
Maudsley, London and Queen Square hospitals before returning to Sydney.
In
1923 he was the first person to be appointed a psychiatrist at
Royal
Prince Alfred Hospital, with the title honorary assistant physician to the
psychiatry clinic. He was given full status in 1928. In 1931 Noble accepted
an invitation to investigate and report on the teaching of psychiatry in
the United States and while there was appointed clinical professor of
psychiatry at Yale University. The report, completed in 1933, led to better
integration with other disciplines in the teaching of psychological
medicine. He returned to Sydney in 1934 to resume his clinical work and to
act as lecturer in psychiatry at University of Sydney during the absence of
Professor WS Dawson on leave. Later the same year he was appointed
consultant psychiatrist in charge of the new psychiatric department at
Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge, a post he then held for over twenty
years. During this time he conducted a private practice as a psychiatrist
in Cambridge and in London.He died at Cambridge 17.3.1965 leaving his
widow, two daughters, of whom one was an almoner and the other a
gynaecologist, and a son, an agricultural scientist, who in due course
returned to Australia."
(College Roll, Royal Australian College
of Physicians)
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1900: "the law in Japan required that the mentally ill be isolated
and confined to their household. This Law of Enclosure of the Mentally
Disturbed remained in effect until 1919, when the government put
the Mental Health Hospital Law into effect. This law required each
district to construct a hospital in which the mentally ill could be housed
and cared for. In 1950, the Mental Health Hygiene Law was
enacted and confining patients at home was now considered to be illegal.
Finally, the Mental Health Law of 1988 replaced the Mental
Health Hygiene Law of 1950, and the mentally ill were given more
rights and an effort was to be made to integrate these patients into the
community" (Erica Rosen
The Influence of Culture on
Mental Health and Psychopathology in Japan 29.11.2001. Her
cited source being Koizuma, K., & Harris, P. (1992) Mental health care in
Japan. Hospital and Community Psychiatry, 43, 1100-1103)
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The Trobriand Islands, where
Bronislaw Malinowski
spent the
first world war, can be
seen on this (1950s) map in the south Solomon Sea.
The sketch map of the Trobriand and neighbouring islands (below) is taken
from Malinowski's 1920 paper on
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"Kula; the Circulating Exchange of
Valuables in the Archipelagoes of Eastern New Guinea".
November 1923: The Australasian Medical Congress
of the British Medical Association held in Melbourne
"Dr
Ralph Noble
set forth his experience in other countries of the work of
detecting and preventing mental deficiency."
[See
International Committee for Mental Hygiene]
"Compulsory
sterilisation had
been abandoned in America, and the ban of marriage might lessen but would
not prevent propagation of the unfit. Medical men must explore the wider
fields of preventive medicine with a view to improving the conditions of
life and the general well-being of the people. Sir JOHN MACPHERSON
explained the measures taken in Scotland and England for dealing with the
feeble-minded."
(British Medical Journal 2.2.1924 p.202)
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Doris Chang and Arthur
Kleinman say that:
"By 1948, China had only around 60 psychiatrists and five
psychiatric
hospitals
with a total of 1,100 beds for a population of nearly 500 million people.
The founding of the People's Republic of China ushered in a period of
growth
and advancements in health services, as part of the official plan to
transform the
social system. By the end of 1959, the number of psychiatric beds
throughout
the country grew to 19 times that of the pre-liberation period. However,
severe
shortages in trained staff, inadequate medical facilities especially in the
rural and
mountainous regions, and limited financial resources demanded stop-gap
measures
that could be widely and inexpensively implemented. In fact, the bulk of
treatment during these years was provided via wide-scale mobilization of
nonprofessional
treatment teams with minimal education and training.
In the 1950s, Russian neuropsychiatric models dominated professional
discourse,
and political priorities focused on maintaining public order. During the
Cultural Revolution, the biological orientation of Chinese psychiatry
provided
some protection from political accusations. Nevertheless, psychiatry was
disrupted
more than any other medical specialty, in that mental illness and other
forms
of deviance were cast as problems of wrong political thinking to be
addressed
through re-education, rather than psychiatric care."
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In 1950 the Victorian Health Department commissioned a study by
Professor Alexander Kennedy of Durham University into the treatment of the
institutionalised mentally ill in Victoria. The resultant Kennedy Report
was scathing of the conditions within the antiquated asylum system; and, in
response, the department advertised the position of inaugural Chairman of
the newly established Mental Hygiene Authority of Victoria.
Eric Cunningham Dax (1908-2008) applied, having read the report and
corresponded with Kennedy, and was successful in gaining the position,
which he held from 1952 to 1968.
(Obituaries Austalia
1957 The Chief Commissioner of Police raised the matter of
scientology with the Mental Hygiene Authority.
(Anderson
Report chapter one)
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DISABLED PEOPLES' INTERNATIONAL
First World Congress' Disabled Peoples' International
Singapore 30 .11.1981-4.12.1981)
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September 2000: BasicNeeds
organisation for a community approach to the needs of people with mental
illness from poor families in developing countries, including India.
Madness, Cannabis and Colonialism by
James H. Mills (University of Strathclyde), St. Martin's Press,
2000. Reviewed by: Satadru Sen
Assistant Professor of South Asian History, Purdue University
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Japan 2003 Atsushi Okubo created Soul Eater a Japanese manga
series set at the "Death Weapon Meister Academy". Whereas
Astroboy sought world
peace, the meisters have weapons that can be transform into humanoid
"death scythes".
Medusa, a witch who contains over a thousand snake familiars inside her
body, gives birth to
Crona, who is of unknown
gender. Crona has a weapon,
Ragnarok, or the Demon Sword. When not a weapon, Ragnarok appears from
Crona's body in a black, vaguely humanoid form.
Gender is just
one of those things that Crona does not know how to deal with.
Medusa abuses Crona and
Ragnarok bullies her, so that Crona is reclusive and fearful of almost
everything. However, her soul is purified by the kindness and compassion of
Maka, a student of the academy. Maka puts herself at risk of losing her
sanity to help Crona. Eventually, Crona is trapped inside the moon, giving
an eternity of loneliness to a character who wanted love and friendship.
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Afghanistan Wali Sultani chained in a small cell at Mia Ali Saeb
Shrine in Samar Khel, outside the eastern city of Jalalabad, Afghanistan.
Mentally ill people are brought here by family members for a 40-day
treatment believed to rid their bodies of bad spirits. Patients are
chained to trees when the weather is hot and to concrete cells when it is
cold. They are provided with water, black pepper and bread.
(Chicago Tribune photo by Kuni Takahashi 12.11.2008.
Story 26.12.2008)
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Index
1407 -
1493 -
1493 -
1502 -
1530 -
1600 -
1602 -
1639 -
1662 -
1664 -
1690 -
1747 -
1770 -
1784 -
1787 -
1788 -
1820 -
1833 -
1834 -
1841 -
1845 -
1852 -
1858 -
1870 -
1876 -
1880 -
1887 -
1892 -
1900 -
1923 -
1948 -
2000 -
Afghanistan 2008
Australia
Bethlem doctor
China 1839
China 1948
India -
index -
Bengal -
Bombay -
Calcutta -
Delhi -
Madras -
Japan:
1839 -
1900 -
1945 -
1951 -
2003 -
Map: India -
Australia -
New Zealand
South
Australia
The anonymous
World Travels 2000
covers roughly the same area as this page on my website, with
maps and histories.
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