Designing Asylums in Southeast Asia: How French Colonial Psychiatrists in Vietnam Looked outside Their Empire (and Why We Should Too)

In August of 1937, Pierre Dorolle, a French psychiatrist and future deputy general of the World Health Organization, took a study trip to Java. He traveled as the secretary of the Indochina delegation to the Intergovernmental Conference of Far-Eastern Countries on Rural Hygiene, in search of innovative models of asylum care that could be imported and adapted for use in colonial Vietnam. For Dorolle, the experiences of Dutch colleagues in the neighboring East Indies seemed to hold the keys to success to a much greater extent than those of his French counterparts in other parts of the empire. This paper emphasizes the role played by international health organizations in the development of psychiatry in the region, which established new and important networks between the colonial empires of Southeast Asia and provided the framework within which study trips and site visits by colonial physicians increasingly took place. In particular, it considers what the history of medicine can offer historians interested in adopting a transnational approach to the study of colonial and post-independence Vietnam.