History of Psychiatry最新文献

This paper explores domestic dynamics in the complex making of institutional psychiatry in Japan in c. 1920-45. It mainly examines gender issues between the relatively long-lasting system of the family care of mentally ill members and the use of freshly introduced systems of psychiatric hospitals. I shall look at the record of Ohji Brain Hospital (1901-45) in Tokyo, which has several thousands of case histories mainly in Tokyo c. 1920-45. From the analysis of the cases of male and female patients, as well as the complex situations of their households and kin groups, I shall look at the gender issues in the making of the psychiatric hospital regime.

In the past decades, there has been an increasing scholarly interest in understanding the development of psychiatry and mental health in non-Western worlds in the modern period. Several collective efforts have been made on the East Asian part, and this special issue has selected the examples of the countries of China, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Articles have utilized social and political constructions of psychiatric discourse, as well as the use of case files to research patients' experiences in mental hospitals. Through these historiographies, connections and meanings of East Asian psychiatry are discussed in both global and local contexts.

This article explores how 'lunatics' emerged and how they were managed beyond the capacity of institutionalization in colonial Hong Kong in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. The story contests the conventional historiography about madmen that focuses on institutions. Unlike in Britain or in other East Asian colonial cities, inpatients stayed at the asylum only for very short periods. Instead of psychiatric admission, they were then transported by ship, either to Canton in China or to London for further care until after World War II. This article analyses how this was done to maintain a 'clean' cityscape, as well as an instrument to ensure the smooth operation of the port city.

Gustav Specht (1860-1940) developed academic psychiatry in Erlangen. After studying medicine in Würzburg, Munich and Berlin, he became assistant medical director in the mental asylum of Erlangen. In 1897 he was appointed extraordinary, and in 1903 ordinary, Professor of Psychiatry. A good clinician and teacher, Specht worked during a time of paradigm change in psychiatry. He was an expert in chronic mania, and introduced the concept of the 'grumbler's delusion'. Paranoia he believed to be the core problem of psychopathology and considered the depressive syndrome as an 'exogenous-type' of reaction. For him, trauma was important in the genesis of mental illness, and his 'hystero-melancholy' anticipated the concept of borderline personality disorder.

This essay draws on evidence in a late nineteenth-century court case and surviving medical notes to provide a case study of a hitherto unidentified case of Autism Spectrum Disorder. The case is particularly interesting in that it not only appears to be the first identification of historical ASD in a female, but also because the patient subsequently developed symptoms of psychosis suggestive of schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder. The unusual survival of detailed medical notes also throws light on the ways in which a difficult patient was treated by supposedly enlightened pioneers of psychiatry.