Indexing Insanity: Medical Knowledge and Mental Illness in the American Colonial Philippines

This paper examines public health and mental illness in the Philippines during the early 20th century. With the arrival of the U.S. in 1898, American medical officials sought to reshape the archipelago through a regimen of hygienic and sanitary reform. While scholars have examined colonial medicine through the state management of infectious diseases in the Philippines, this project argues that foregrounding the history of psychiatry and mental illness evinces another crucial layer in the politics of public health and the shaping of medical knowledge. Despite U.S. authorities and their attempts to manage the insane through the building of facilities and the implementation of treatments, non-western medical practitioners, social movement figures, and patients themselves also asserted claims over how to address and properly care for those deemed to be mentally insane. These configurations illustrate how medical knowledge about mental illness was not unilaterally defined but interdependently shaped between American and Filipino actors. Moreover, this project considers the ways various sectors of society contributed to the formation of psychiatric care and shifting ideas for what constituted mental illness across clinical practices and popular discourses. Madness and its multiple valences offer a window to view the complex formations and contested visions of medical authority and modernity across U.S. trans-Pacific terrain.