Chapter 5 - Treatments

Summary

‘The treatment received by the patients in this hospital is up to the level of the latest modern methods employed in all the modern mental hospitals.’

—J. E. Dhunjibhoy, 1927

Ranchi was, Dhunjibhoy liked to claim, a ‘modern mental hospital’ that benefited from the introduction of ‘all the latest approved Western methods of treatment’. The evidence provided in his regular reports and publications fully substantiates this claim. When he was not travelling to ‘keep abreast with the rapid advancement of the science’, Dhunjibhoy read profusely. His library books and journals at the Ranchi Indian Mental Hospital have been well preserved and are testimony to his profound and wide-ranging knowledge of hospital management and therapeutics. There are books that he might have acquired well before the institution's inauguration and which would have helped him to set up the institution from scratch, and complete sets of some of the most authoritative journals, considered vital reading by Western-trained psychiatrists around the world. These included, American Journal of Psychiatry (from 1923), British Medical Journal (from 1927), Journal of Mental Science (from 1921), the Lancet (from 1927), the Practitioner (from c. 1929), Psychoanalytic Review (1921–42), Psychological Bulletin (1927), Psychiatry – Journal of the Biology and the Pathology of Interpersonal Relations (1938, 1939), International Journal of Psychoanalysis (1920), Brain.