Date: Tuesday, 10 Nov 2020
Time: 5 PM (GMT +8)
Speaker: Harry Yi-Jui Wu, Director and Assistant Professor, Medical Ethics and Humanities Unit, Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, The University of Hong Kong

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In the 19th Century, there was an increase of mental asylums in the British Empire. They reflected the positivist and bureaucratic mentality as the panacea to manage lunatics as social problems in the time of urbanization and industrialization. When studying the history of psychiatry in Britain’s colonies, scholars have written quite extensively about racial segregation and racial psychiatric theories derived along these practices. However, if one puts Hong Kong in the context of port governmentality and the economy of migration, mental health suggests something very different from what it means in other colonies. In the port city on the margin of the British and Chinese Empires, all aspects of migration were linked to the worldwide chain of business, and services were commoditized.

Managing “lunatics” or “the insane” was a measure for Hong Kong to maintain its function as the doorway between the two empires. Many of these lunatics were suicidal coolies trying to jump off the Praya, or drunken sailors who were brought to the police station immediately upon arrival. Lacking rigorous research, governmental and medical officers tried to uphold the regular operation of the prospering trade port in the cross-cultural context. Small scale of confinement means asylums only functioned as temporary custodial facilities before “patients” of different nationalities were repatriated back to where they came from. In this presentation, I deem the early development of mental health in Hong Kong an arrangement settled along the networks of empires based on the marine nature of the port city. This new research on one hand re-examines the existing historiography of colonial medicine. On the other hand, it considers Hong Kong as a fluid concept and the use of Hong Kong as a process rather than a static entity.

About the Speaker:
Harry Yi-Jui Wu is Director and Assistant Professor at Medical Ethics and Humanities Unit, Lee Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, The University of Hong Kong. His book, Mad by the Millions: Mental Disorders and the Early Years of the World Health Organization will be published by MIT Press in April, 2021.

Moderator: Laura Meek, Assistant Professor, Centre for the Humanities and Medicine, HKU