Sæwulf is known only from his fascinating autobiographical account of his pilgrimage to the Holy Land around the year 1100 at the time of the First Crusade, which can be compared with such works as Adomnán’s book on the Holy Places and Hugeburc’s account of Willibald’s journey to the Holy Land, both excerpted in Volume One. The excerpt here recounts a storm and Sæwulf’s visit to Bethlehem.

Adomnán had come from Ireland to settle on Iona off the west coast of Scotland where he was abbot for many years. He wrote a biography of St. Columba, and the work excerpted here, namely a book about the Holy Places in and around Jerusalem, for which his source was the account given to him by Arculf who visited him on Iona. Bede wrote a version of this work, and a short passage is included here for the purpose of comparison.

This chapter reconstructs the dynamics of the initial encounter between the British and the question of mental health illness in Palestine into the 1920s. Far from recapitulating a familiar narrative about the colonial introduction of psychiatry as a moment of rupture, it instead offers a multi-layered account of the opening of the first government mental health hospital at Bethlehem, in order to highlight how the British were in fact latecomers to an ongoing history of psychiatry in Palestine. Well before the British occupation of 1917, Palestinians had recourse to a range of medical and non-medical options for the management of the mentally ill, and those existing understandings, experiences, and institutions crucially shaped how the British responded to mental health illness across these formative years. As well as tracing the establishment of a key institution, this chapter also introduces a central figure in the history of psychiatry in mandate Palestine: Dr Mikhail Shedid Malouf.