Grégory Dufaud, Nicolas Henckes, Marianna Scarfone
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
Summary This introduction to this special issue devoted to mental hygiene movements in Europe examines the issues and problems facing their historical study. While the definition of mental hygiene was obvious to contemporaries, it referred to highly divergent projects in different socio-political contexts. As a result, historians have struggled to come up with a unified definition of mental hygiene as a category for analysis. After outlining historiographical responses to this question, this essay suggests that mental hygiene can best be understood as a specific way of articulating four dimensions of the psychiatric discipline, namely its organization and its relationship to the state, individuals and science. The final section provides an overview of the themes developed by the articles in this special issue.
期刊介绍:
Social History of Medicine , the journal of the Society for the Social History of Medicine, is concerned with all aspects of health, illness, and medical treatment in the past. It is committed to publishing work on the social history of medicine from a variety of disciplines. The journal offers its readers substantive and lively articles on a variety of themes, critical assessments of archives and sources, conference reports, up-to-date information on research in progress, a discussion point on topics of current controversy and concern, review articles, and wide-ranging book reviews.