This book provides the first comprehensive study of the history of Hungarian psychiatry between 1850 and 1920, placed in both an Austro-Hungarian and wider European comparative framework. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the book captures the institutional worlds of the different types of psychiatric institutions intertwined with the intellectual history of mental illness and the micro-historical study of everyday institutional practice. It uncovers the ways in which psychiatrists gradually organised themselves and their profession, defined their field and role, claimed expertise within the medical sciences, lobbied for legal reform and the establishment of psychiatric institutions, fought for university positions, the establishment of departments and specialised psychiatric teaching. Beyond this story of increasing professionalization, this study also explores how psychiatry became invested in social critique. It shows how psychiatry gradually moved beyond its closely defined disciplinary borders and became a public arena, with psychiatrists broadening their focus from individual patients to society at large, whether through mass publications or participation in popular social movements. Finally, the book examines how psychiatry began to influence the concept of mental health during the first decades of the twentieth century, against the rich social and cultural context of fin-de-siècle Budapest and the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy.
Author(s): Emese Lafferton
Series: Mental Health in Historical Perspective
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 460
City: Cham
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
1 Introduction
2 Histories of Psychiatry and the Hungarian Model
The Self-Image of Late-Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry
Histories of European Psychiatry
The World Without Psychiatry
Therapeutic Asylums and Moral Treatment
Academic Research and Biological Psychiatry
The Hungarian Model
Care for the Insane in Hungary from the Late-Eighteenth to the Middle of the Nineteenth Century
Religious Care: The Eger Hospital of the Hospitaller Order
Early State Initiatives in the Field of Public Health Care
Medical Teaching and Professional Forums
Nationalism and Medical Forums
Boom in Psychiatric and Medical Institutions (1860s–1920)
Public Asylums and Hospitals
Legislation for the Insane
Pressure of Numbers and Alternative Institutions
Modern Scientific Research and Professionalisation (1870s–1920)
3 The Bourgeois Family World of the Private Asylum: The Schwartzer Enterprise from 1850
The Schwartzer Dynasty
The Private Asylum
Pólya’s Asylum
Schwartzer’s Asylum
Laboratory of the Human Body and Soul: Schwartzer’s Comprehensive Theory of Mental Illness in Context
Enlightenment and Romantic Traditions in the Culture of Austro-Hungarian Medicine
Western Theories of the Mind
The Medical Culture of Nineteenth-Century Vienna and Pest
Aetiology of Mental Illnesses in Schwartzer’ Theory
Predisposing Causes
Precipitating Causes
Patient Observation
The Therapeutic Asylum
Physical Treatment
Moral Treatment
Doctor and Patient
Conclusion: The Schwartzer Psychiatric Enterprise
4 The Kingdom in Miniature: Public Mental Asylums from the 1860s
Asylum Life Under Four Directors, 1868–1920
Life Conditions, Nursing and Treatment
The Use of Coercion and Restraint
Legal Regulation Versus Reality of Admission, Discharge and Guardianship in Asylums and Psychiatric Hospital Wards
Medical and Bureaucratic Criteria and Conditions of Admission
The Double System of Admission and Guardianship
5 The University Clinic and the Birth of Biological Psychiatry. Academic Research, Teaching and Therapy from the 1880s
Self-Perception. Teaching and Research in the Making of the Psychiatrist
The Medical Context of Nineteenth-Century Scientific Psychiatry
Károly Laufenauer and the Establishment of the Department of Mental Health and Pathology and Its Related Clinic
Laufenauer’s Observation Ward and the Mad Strangler at Saint Roch Hospital
The Split and Move of the Clinic
Academic Research by Károly Laufenauer and Károly Schaffer
Neuro-Anatomy, Neuro-Pathology and Brain-Histology
Hypnosis Studies
The Integrative Function of the University Clinic in a Fragmenting Profession
6 Fragmenting Institutional Landscape. Alternatives of Specialised Institutions, Colonies and Family Care on the Turn-of-the-Century
The Relationship of Academic and Asylum Psychiatry
Old Problems, New Ways. Alternatives to the Mental Asylum
“Annex Asylums”
Family Care and Colonies
Small Specialised Institutes for “Imbeciles” and “Idiots,” Epileptics, Alcoholics, Nervous Patients, and Criminals
Institutes for “Imbeciles” and “Idiots”
Epileptic Institute
Institute for Alcoholics
Sanatoria for Nervous Ailments
National Observation- and Mental Hospital for Persons in Detention and Prisoners
7 Asylum Statistics and the Psycho-Social Reality of the Hungarian Kingdom
Social Parameters of Asylum Populations
Gender and Age Distribution
Marital Status and Religious Affiliation
Religion
Social and Professional Status
The “Medical Parameters” of Asylums
Problematic Taxonomy
Admission Categories of Mental Disorders
Discharges
8 Invading the Public and the Private: The Hygiene of Everyday Life, Shell-Shock and the Politics of Turn-of-the-Century Psychiatric Expertise
Shifts in the Social Functions of Psychiatry by the Turn of the Century
Degeneration, Social Problems and Prophylactics
Neurasthenia or Nervous Exhaustion
Paralysis Progressiva and Female Emancipation
Alcohol Problems, Class and Crime
Darwinism, Lamarckism and Elements of Eugenic Thinking
Shell Shock and Traumatic Neurosis48
Artúr Sarbó and the Theory of Micro-Structural Changes
Ernő Jendrássik’s Degenerationist Understanding of War Neurosis
Viktor Gonda’s “New Electroshock Therapy” at the Rózsahegy Hospital
Sándor Ferenczi and the “Discovery of the Psyche”: The Psychoanalytical Approach
9 Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
