Abstract
In the 150 years leading up to World War I, lunatic asylums became the largest and most controversial medical institutions in the Western World. It is within these facilities that the discursive formulations and clinical practices that eventually became known as “psychiatry” took shape. Over the course of the 1800s, asylum medical officers underwent a decades-long process of professionalization – creating national associations, founding journals devoted to the study of mental diseases, and finally integrating “psychological medicine” into university medical training. The legal requirements of medical certification and the institutional bureaucracies of record keeping created the foundations upon which new taxonomies of mental illness were first constructed. This chapter outlines the institutional origins of psychiatry as a human science, focusing on what historians refer to as the “long” nineteenth century – that is, the period from 1760 to 1914.
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Wright, D. (2022). Asylums and Alienists: The Institutional Foundations of Psychiatry, 1760–1914. In: McCallum, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Human Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-7255-2_100
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