1768-1771 Voyage of Captain James Cook in the Endeavour

1770 Cook landed at Botany Bay (named from its luxuriant vegetation) and named the Country New South Wales. Botany Bay is an inlet 8 kilometers (5 miles) south of the present Sydney. It is the outlet of the River Georges. The first European settlers (including convicts) arrived here in 1788.

1787 "Assistant Surgeon W. Dick offered his medical services and the lease of his private lunatic asylum to the Government of Bengal." (Ernst, W. 1988 p.51)

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."

"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)

1833 Government of India Act (of British Parliament) continued (from 1834) the government of India in the hands of the East India Company, but without it trading.

"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

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.

"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."

1842 Discovery of copper by Francis Dutton and Charles Bagot at Kapunda. External links: Kapunda - postcards from the mine - postcards from Adelaide -

" Dr Edward Wright, stood trial for manslaughter in March 1845 after a (private) mad patient in his care died. Negligence, drunkeness and overuse of opium (or perhaps it was morphine) were alleged. This was just two months after a medical board had been established to check the qualifications of doctors and compile a register of legally qualified men according to certain criteria. The doctors who performed the autopsy on the dead patient and gave evidence against Wright were the president and secretary of this new board". He was aquitted on a technicality. "He went to the Victorian goldfields in early 1850s, returned to Adelaide and died in 1859." (Michael Bollen)

1851 Victoria colony established in Gold Rush fever. External links to Melbourne Museum, Victoria and their Marvellous Melbourne history web site

22.3.1852: First thirteen lunatics move in the Adelaide Lunatic Asylum

"...only one of the three proposed pavilions had been constructed. This building was to be the administrative centre of the asylum while housing chronic and convalescent patients in the upper floors, and was designed to copy the administrative building at the Essex County Asylum at Brentwood in shape."

"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."

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