Dr Sloan Mahone: List of publications

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'Hat on - hat off': trauma and trepanation in Kisii, western Kenya

2014

Journal article

Journal of Eastern African Studies

In 1957, Kenya's government psychiatrist and director of the colony's Mathari Mental Hospital travelled to western Kenya to investigate the practice of trepanation among the Gusii people in Kisii District. Applied to relieve pressure on the brain by scraping away a portion of the skull with a hooked knife, trepanation was exceptionally rare by the 20th century, but remained common in Kisii where the operations are conducted by a group of skilled practitioners. This article uses materials from psychiatrist Edward Margetts' personal papers, including photographs, diaries and clinical notes, to describe and examine the practice of trepanation in Kisii in the 1950s, concluding with a discussion of the social meaning of trepanation and trauma in modern Kenya. © 2014 © 2014 Taylor & Francis.

Kenya, medicine, photography, psychiatry, trauma

Introduction

2013

Chapter

Health in Africa

Psychiatry and Empire

2007

Book

Psychiatry and Empire brings together scholars in the History of Medicine to explore questions of race, gender and power relations in former colonial states across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the Pacific. Focusing on the intellectual histories of concepts of mental illness, mental healing and strategies of coping and resistance, this volume advances our understanding of the rise of modern psychiatry as it collided with, and sometimes underpinned, the psychology of colonial rule.

Psychiatry and the Practical Problems of Empire in East Africa

2007

Chapter

Psychiatry and Empire

H.L. Gordon first exercised his philosophical contemplation of the causes of African ‘backwardness’ from his farm in Kenya early in the 1920s. Gordon spent his days as a self-described medical farmer until his posting to Mathari Mental Hospital in Nairobi afforded him the opportunity to provide the Kenya government with the evidence to support his developing theories.1 In 1932, the British Medical Journal published a summary of Gordon’s work with pathologist, F.W. Vint that averred: ‘Dr. Gordon has found that a low degree of mentality is widely prevalent, constituting what in a European community would be a social danger.’2 The author, a colleague of Gordon’s, concluded that should such differences between the European and African mind be shown, efforts to educate the African to the standard of the European could prove to be either futile or disastrous. Kenya Colony provided an ideal environment for the application of medical science, particularly the psychological sciences, to the challenges of governance just as Gordon had hoped. With his help, the types of mental disorders found at Mathari were scrutinized for possible associations with the educability or, more specifically, the natural limits to the education of the African subject.

Psychiatry in the East African Colonies: A Background to Confinement

2006

Journal article

International Review of Psychiatry

This article is concerned with the discipline of psychiatry in colonial East Africa as it emerged out of the crime and disorder problem to become an intellectually significant ‘East African School’ of psychiatry. The process of lunacy certification, in particular, provides a snapshot of the medical and political tensions that existed among the medical establishment, the prison system and the colonial courts, all of whom sought to define collective African behaviour. This historical article utilises archaic terminology, such as ‘lunatic’ or ‘lunacy’, as these categories were in use at the time.

The Psychology of Rebellion: Colonial Medical Responses to Dissent in British East Africa

2006

Journal article

Journal of African History

This article opens with a retelling of colonial accounts of the ‘mania of 1911’, which took place in the Kamba region of Kenya Colony. The story of this ‘psychic epidemic’ and others like it would be recounted over the years as evidence depicting the predisposition of Africans to episodic mass hysteria. This use of medical and psychological language in primarily non-medical contexts serves to highlight the intellectual and political roles psychiatric ideas played in colonial governance. The salience of such ideas was often apparent in the face of increasing social tension, charismatic leadership and a proliferation of East African prophetic movements. This article addresses the attempts by the colonial authorities to understand or characterize, in psychological terms, a progression of African ‘rebellious types’ in society that often took the form of prophets and visionaries, but were diagnosed as epileptic, neurotic or suffering from ‘religious mania’.

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