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Horizontal Scenographies. The Sickbed as a Setting of Psychiatric Subjectivation

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Abstract

An illustration from 1912 takes us into the interior of the State Hospital Haina, a hospital for mentally ill men and women, which was founded on the grounds of a former convent in the province of Hesse (Fig. 1). The picture reveals an (idealized) view of a ward that is furnished according to its purpose: one bed after another is lined up along the walls in a large and open space.

This essay was written for the project “Bett und Bad. Räume und Objekte therapeutischen Handelns in der Psychiatrie des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts. Grundzüge einer materialen Psychiatriegeschichte” (Project Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Heinz-Peter Schmiedebach, SCHM 1311/11-1), supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Hydropathy was a psychiatric treatment method, where patients were placed for several hours, days or even weeks in usually lukewarm bathing water. Doctors prescribed hydropathy especially for “restless” and “loud” patients, who were not to be kept in bed, as it was said. On the general practice of hydropathy, see Dehio, H[einrich]. 1904, “Einige Erfahrungen über die Anwendung von Dauerbädern bei Geisteskranken. Nach einem auf der Versammlung mitteldeutscher Neurologen und Psychiater am 25. October 1903 gehaltenen Vortrage.” Psychiatrisch-Neurologische Wochenschrift 45: 481–486.

  2. 2.

    The Report on the Situation of Psychiatry in the Federal Republic of Germany, commissioned by the German Bundestag and finished in 1975, in short “Psychiatrie-Enquête,” showed that 62.2% of the psychiatric institutions existing at the time were located in buildings built before 1925. 31.1% of these buildings were from before 1900. In their floor plans (including large wards introduced in the course of bed treatment) and the overall plans, they were no longer sufficient for the therapeutic aspirations of the 1970 s. At the time the report was written, sleeping rooms in psychiatric institutions were furnished with four to ten beds, some even with more than twenty beds, whereas two- and three-bed rooms were already the rule in general hospitals. These over-sized wards were left over from the redesign of psychiatric institutions, which had taken place in the course of the introduction of bed treatment (cf. Deutscher Bundestag 1975, 136f.).

  3. 3.

    “We deal with characters, delegates, representatives, or, more nicely, lieutenants (from the French ‘lieu’ ‘tenant,’ i.e., holding the place of, for, someone else); some figurative, others nonfigurative; some human, others nonhuman; some competent, others incompetent. You want to cut through this rich diversity of delegates and artificially create two heaps of refuse: ‘society’ on one side and ‘technology’ on the other? That's your privilege, but I have a less messy task in mind.” (Johnson 1988, 308).

  4. 4.

    Following the sociologist Madeleine Akrich, the practice the bed induces could be described as a prescription, i.e. a behavior or an action that a nonhuman delegate transfers to a human (Johnson 1988, 301; Akrich 1987).

  5. 5.

    [Franz] Nissl, Die psychiatrische Klinik. Undated, 7. University Archive Hamburg, Sig. H-III-682/1.

  6. 6.

    According to Emil Kraepelin, there were four reasons why patients should be moved or admitted to the surveillance wards: 1. Bed rest for healing purposes (agitated, manic, paralyzed, hebephrenic, anxiously restless, absconding patients); 2. close observation (for morphine and cocaine addicts, epileptics, prisoners under investigation); 3. physical aspects (the “unclean”, those refusing food, those in a catatonic state, etc.); 4. surveillance (anxious, melancholy patients, patients posing a danger to themselves, dazed patients, etc.). (Kraepelin 1902; see further Engstrom 2003).

  7. 7.

    Kolb (1907) was an exception.

  8. 8.

    Following from this, a question could also be raised about illumination, which was also discussed in this context – due to the new possibilities of electrification. The night also required a certain degree of visibility.

  9. 9.

    “Directly the bed is called for … we cease to be soldiers in the army of the upright; we become deserters. … irresponsible and disinterested and able, perhaps for the first time for years, to look round, to look up – to look, for example, at the sky.” (Woolf 1926, 18–19).

  10. 10.

    University Archive Heidelberg (UAH), medical files of the Psychiatric University Clinic Heidelberg, inventory no. L-III, Sig. 01/1, letter from 16 September 1895.

  11. 11.

    Since the early nineteenth century, psychiatrists regarded the design of the institutional milieu as a central means of convalescence (cf. Schott/Tölle, 446). In this sense, the room was also a therapeutic instrument.

  12. 12.

    In the late nineteenth century, the term “folie à deux” or “induced madness” designated the transfer of a mental illness to another person. The possible danger of a mental “contagion” might also be found in the common accommodation of the patients. See Kraepelin (1903, 94f.) and others.

  13. 13.

    UAH, medical files of the Psychiatric University Clinic Heidelberg, inventory no. L-III (men), Sig. 00/43, entry from 23rd September 1900.

  14. 14.

    Neisser pointed out that patients lying in bed were easier to keep there through a lack of clothing, because hardly anyone wanted to expose themselves scantily clothed to the gaze of others.

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  1. Hamburg, Germany

    Monika Ankele

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  1. Monika Ankele
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  1. Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

    Lars Friedrich

  2. Kunstuniversität Linz, Linz, Austria

    Karin Harrasser

  3. University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Ottersberg, Germany

    Céline Kaiser

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Ankele, M. (2019). Horizontal Scenographies. The Sickbed as a Setting of Psychiatric Subjectivation. In: Friedrich, L., Harrasser, K., Kaiser, C. (eds) Scenographies of the Subject. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-12906-4_4

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