Beyond the Asylum: Mental Illness in French Colonial Vietnam by Claire E. Edington (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Beyond the Asylum: Mental Illness in French Colonial Vietnam by Claire E. Edington C. Michele Thompson Edington, Claire E.–Beyond the Asylum: Mental Illness in French Colonial Vietnam. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. 291 p. Claire E. Edington’s Beyond the Asylum: Mental Illness in French Colonial Vietnam truly does go “beyond the asylum” in its examination of the complex interplay between culture, both French and Vietnamese, medicine, and patterns of colonization and resistance to it in French Indochina, primarily Vietnam. This solidly researched and gracefully written volume is thought-provoking in many ways, and pertinent to the study of many topics in Vietnamese history from the late nineteenth century to about 1950, that it really should be read by anyone who studies or teaches about Vietnam during that period. Beyond the Asylum is based on Edington’s extensive archival research in Vietnam, France, and Cambodia and on a solid selection of secondary sources in English, French, and Vietnamese. She uses her numerous archivally sourced illustrations, which range from blueprints to reproductions of artwork from popular literature of the period, to maps and photographs, to draw attention to important points in the text in a way that a mere written description never could. For example, the very first figure, a 1934 photograph of the entrance to the Biên Hòa Asylum, [End Page 213] shows a road through a gate that is clearly decorative, rather than truly confining, and grounds with large trees and grassy lawns. The photograph illuminates and supports Edington’s statement that this asylum was based on a “more humanitarian conception of care than earlier methods of confinement—one that proved useful in improving the poor public image of the asylum” and that “the appearance of freedom itself was seen as curative” (p. 56). This, in turn, sets the scene for much of the discussion which follows on the everyday lives of patients and staff in Chapter 2 and even the author’s arguments regarding therapeutic labour in an increasingly exploitative colonial agricultural system in Chapter 3. Edington’s discussion of these subjects builds her case that while the French tried “to fashion the asylum as a world unto itself,” the paradigms in the outer world constantly impinged on French colonial asylums (p. 85). The author’s depiction of the history of the French colonial adoption of the labour-as-therapy pattern of treatment primarily from Dutch colonial mental health practices in the Dutch East Indies (today’s Indonesia) is especially interesting. It is rare for works on the history of colonial era medicine in Southeast Asia to go beyond the boundaries of any one colonial power or to discuss in any detail collaborative efforts between and among medical professionals from them. Clearly, there is more work to be done on the subject and Edington is leading the way. No work of scholarship is perfect and, despite its many strengths, this one is not either. It appears that most, if not all, of the small problems that I feel compelled to note appeared during the process of cutting this volume down in terms of length and, probably, in terms of notes. For example, on page 23 Edington discusses the Vietnamese concept of mental health and mental illness. She mentions both fourteenth-century documents and the physician Lȇ Hữu Trác in a sentence structure that suggests he himself lived in the fourteenth century when he lived in the eighteenth. There are also places (for example, page 25) where the source cited does not match the source from which the quote derives. On page 25, Edington is citing one of my own publications, but the wrong one. There are other small problems of this sort that are not worth going over in detail. Almost all of them concern the pre-modern period and Vietnamese Traditional Medicine and they do not materially affect Edington’s argument or the many great strengths of this book. One of those strengths is Edington’s commitment to discussing the effects of French colonization on ordinary everyday Vietnamese people and the resulting deterioration in what the French, and sometimes the Vietnamese, defined as mental health. This can be...