Monday, March 05, 2007
THE OUTSIDERS
I remember having gone with my Tiyang Inez to visit someone she knew who was at that time confined inside the mental hospital in Mandaluyong. I was a little boy then, no older than ten. There was another person with us who kept me company out in the grounds while Tiyang Inez was inside. I thought about this incident upon coming across an essay by Ambeth Ocampo regarding madness during the nineteenth-century.
While poring over some bundles of documents at the National Archives pertaining to insanity as recorded by the Guardia Civil, Ambeth was surprised to discover that simply roaming the streets and acting weird was a good enough reason to be arrested and committed to the Real Hospicio de San Jose, an insane asylum in Manila.
Even more astounding was that not a single document indicated that these vagrants were committed by relatives or friends. In essence, it was the Guardia Civil who made all the arrests and eventual passing of judgment.
Through all these cases of innocuous Sisas, Ambeth highlighted a rather interesting case; that of Nicolas Umli Libanan. In April of 1895, the governor of Nueva Vizcaya received a letter of complaint about this man from the Capitan Municipal, the parish priest, and prominent citizens of the town of Dupax in Nueva Vizcaya. Supposedly, for two years, Nicolas Umli Libanan was observed to be suffering from dementia — speaking incoherently, or speaking in tongues, or resigned to long bouts of silence and then suddenly breaking into laughter or annoying guffaws. However, there were also times he would speak well and act timidly. Nonenetheless, he was restrained with an iron chain clamped to his leg.
A government doctor eventually declared him mentally ill with monomania religiosa, which meant he would mimic the actions of a priest. Thank God it wasn’t the actions of a nun that he was accused of mimicking; otherwise, Nicolas Umli Libanan might have been burnt at stake right there and then.
I’ve lived in New York for many years, and from my observations, folks of Manila, for the most part, are very normal and staid compared to certain characters of the Big Apple who would have absolutely worked the Guardia Civil in overtime.
Source:
Madness in the 19th Century
Bonifacio’s Bolo by Ambeth Ocampo
Anvil Publishing
Labels: asylum, dementia, Manila history
posted by Señor Enrique at 6:55 PM
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