History of Psychiatry最新文献

A sample of case histories that illustrate the work of the Amsterdam Suggestive Psychotherapy Clinic (1887-1893) taken from my translation of the classic French text Psycho-Thérapie-Communications statistiques, Observations Cliniques Nouvelles and previously only available in that language, is presented and contextualised here. The founding physicians, Albert Willem Van Renterghem and Frederik Van Eeden, hoped to revolutionise medical practice with the methodical application of hypnotic suggestion. It is concluded that their ambitions were a lost cause by the turn of the century.

This article examines the French historical, scientific, social and biographical background to Constance Pascal's filmscript 'La Goutte de Sang' concerning the search for a reliable paternity test. The philosophical argument is between adherence to scientific truth against entrenched social custom. Pascal's filmscript highlights routine misogyny in the scientific workplace and the injustices to women and children of male sexual irresponsibility. I analyse the relation between Pascal's personal life, her psychiatric career and the filmscript's critique of scientific efforts at social reform, concluding with her enduring belief in the value of science based on humane principles.

The article examines how Russian and Soviet psychiatry perceived Sergey Korsakov (1854-1900) as a founding figure of the discipline, from his death in 1900 until his centennial in 1954. Initially, contemporaries defined his posthumous image through three key roles: a humane doctor, a scientist, and a public figure, each reflecting the core values of the medical profession at that time. Although his disciples succeeded in integrating their mentor into the Soviet pantheon after the Bolshevik Revolution, Korsakov's public image underwent a radical transformation. As a result of the late Stalinist ideological campaigns the psychiatrist's image was recast to emphasize his identity as a great scientist, a materialist and a precursor to Ivan Pavlov, while his earlier persona as a civic activist was erased.

A century ago, malaria therapy for general paralysis of the insane was a celebrated Nobel Prize-winning psychiatric treatment widely used across the globe. However, in recent years, its legacy has come under increasing scrutiny, with some historians and physicians questioning the claims of it being an effective treatment. This paper, utilizing published accounts and medical record archives, describes malaria therapy for neurosyphilis as conducted by psychiatrist, Reginald Ellery at Victoria's Mont Park Hospital for the Insane, 1927-1928. It also evaluates Ellery's claims about malaria therapy's effectiveness. This research delineates several clinical and research-related factors - such as diagnostic drift, adjunct interventions, and healthy-patient selection - that likely contributed to an overestimation of malaria therapy's effectiveness. Additionally, it demonstrates that patient outcomes as reported in the medical records are notably less positive than described by Ellery in his published accounts. Consequentially, the findings of this study do not support the claims of malaria being an effective treatment for neurosyphilis.

Drawing on heretofore overlooked archival documents and primary sources, this article reconstructs and contextualizes William O. Krohn's psychological laboratory at the Eastern Illinois Hospital for the Insane in Kankakee between 1897 and 1899, the first of its kind to be established within a U.S. asylum. Situated against the backdrop of psychiatry's public crisis of scientific legitimacy in the 1890s and Kankakee's own history of political upheaval and administrative instability, Krohn's laboratory represented an early, ambitious attempt to bridge institutional psychiatry and abnormal psychology through experimental psychopathology. Its brief history illuminates both the internal limitations of psychometric psychiatry and the structural and material constraints of the asylum as a site for scientific inquiry, especially when contrasted with the then-emerging psychopathic hospital.

Richard Rows may be an unfamiliar name to historians of psychiatry today, other than for his role as superintendent of the Red Cross Military Hospital at Maghull, near Liverpool, during the First World War. Accordingly, this paper attempts a conspectus of Rows' career in order to contextualise the psychotherapeutic approach he developed, not only to "shell-shock" patients during the War but also to "functional mental illnesses" encountered in subsequent civilian practice. This examination shows that although Rows adopted some Freudian or quasi-Freudian psychological vocabulary and techniques, as did many of his contemporaries, he also had a long-standing commitment to a physiological conceptualisation of brain disorders. For Rows, this was not incompatible with, but complementary to, his psychodynamic approach in clinical encounters. His work extended beyond the limits of psychiatry to adopt perspectives originating with contemporary neurologists and experimental neurophysiologists.

In 1777 a strange, distracted young woman took up residence under a haystack in a village outside Bristol, attracting much local attention. 'Louisa' gained wider celebrity after the writer Hannah More publicised her plight in the national press. She subsequently spent several years in a private madhouse and then the lunatic ward of Guy's Hospital, where she died in 1800. It was generally presumed that Louisa was of noble foreign birth and possibly the hapless victim of family intrigue or even sexual exploitation, her mysterious story being interpreted as a contemporary morality tale. In actuality, recorded circumstances demonstrated quite sympathetic communal responses toward victims of insanity, as well as different options for providing care and treatment in 18th-century England.

James Cowles Prichard of the Red Lodge: A Life in Science During the Age of Improvement traces Prichard's contributions to the development of psychiatric theory and the psychiatric profession. It also explores his broader range of scientific interests clearly set in cultural and personal context. Armed with his Edinburgh MD, he published innovative anthropological textbooks demonstrating the unity and single origin of the human species. As physician to Bristol's workhouse/lunatic asylum, he studied his captive patients' neurological and psychiatric conditions, avidly collected case histories, gathered medical statistics widely and mined Continental psychiatric literature to publish influential works on neurology and psychological medicine, notably formulating the condition called moral insanity. Appointed to the Lunacy Commission, he published a manual of psychiatric jurisprudence and participated in the development of asylumdom.

From 1871 to 1875, a series of annual meetings termed medical conversazione was held at the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, organised by the Medical Superintendent, James Crichton-Browne. This article examines the setting, content, reception, and purposes of these meetings, using reportage from the local popular press to supplement the relatively limited accounts published in contemporary medical journals. The evidence indicates that the conversazione provided educational opportunity for invited local practitioners by showcasing the clinical and experimental research work of the Asylum. Hence these meetings showed some resemblance to modern medical meetings devoted to diseases of the brain. However, in addition they provided spectacle and entertainment, akin to the theatrical productions also hosted at the Asylum.

The second half of the 20th century saw significant progress toward the destigmatization of psychiatric illness and the embrace of mental health care by the American public. Attitudes toward political leaders and candidates with psychiatric diagnoses also evolved during this period-although not at the same pace. From the 1940s through the early 1970s, such diagnoses damaged the careers of prominent officials including Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater and Democratic vice-presidential nominee Thomas Eagleton. By the 1980s and 1990s, candidates like Tom Turnipseed and Lawton Chiles increasingly embraced candor with regard to their psychiatric diagnoses and histories, and voters often proved forgiving. A transitional event in this development was the now largely forgotten hospitalization of Gerald Ford's Secretary of the Interior, Stanley K. Hathaway, for depression in 1975. This paper examines the Hathaway case and argues that Ford's willingness to stand by Hathaway proved a turning point in the embrace of politicians with psychiatric illnesses by the American electorate.