Anxious? Depressed? Fatigued? Slowly losing your mind? In their new colony, American colonial officers began succumbing to a strange mental disorder that they could not explain.

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The book version of this podcast is called Silk, Silver, Spices, Slaves: Lost Tales from the Philippine Colonial Period, 1565-1946. ⁠Purchase here⁠. (An ebook version is ⁠also available in Amazon⁠.)

References:

Rizal, Jose P. (1913). “Sobre la indolencia de los filipinos” (Austin Craig, trans.) Original work published in La Solidaridad, 1890.

“They Get ‘Philippinitis’: White Persons Suffer From It If They Stay Too Long in the Islands” (26 December 1908). Mariposa Gazette, LIV(31).

Anderson, Warwick (2007). Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines. Ateneo de Manila Press. 

Roosevelt, Nicholas (1926). The Philippines: A Treasure and a Problem. J.H. Sears & Company.

Pringle, Yolana (2016). “Neurasthenia at Mengo Hospital, Uganda: A Case Study in Psychiatry and a Diagnosis, 1906–50.” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 44(2), p. 241-262.

Wang, Wen-Ji (2014). “Tropical Neurasthenia or Oriental Nerves? White Breakdowns in China.” Psychiatry and Chinese History (Howard Chiang, ed.), p. 111-128.

Tam, Louise (2014). “Neurasthenia Revisited: Psychologizing Precarious Labor and Migrant Status in Contemporary Discourses of Asian American Nervousness.” Disability and the Global South, 1(2), p. 340-364. 

Anderson, Warwick (1997). “The Trespass Speaks: White Masculinity and Colonial Breakdown.” The American Historical Review, 102(5), p. 1343-1370.