History of Psychiatry: Madness,Science,Culture

In the 1940s, some of the most influential psychiatrists of their day such as David K. Henderson and Aubrey Lewis were taking an active interest in the well-being of older people. Spurred on by the fears of a rising population of older people, overcrowding in mental hospitals, social changes and an awareness of the lack of knowledge of older people’s mental illnesses, they and others began to explore further the mental health needs of older people. There was a marked change from a predominant interest in neuropathology in older mental hospital patients to emphasis on the need to provide clinical care and treatment for people in the community. The establishment of the new specialty of geriatric medicine and inception of the National Health Service gave further impetus to service development.

This article stresses the main lines of Thomas Aquinas’s philosophy on the nature of the body-soul union. Following Aristotle, Aquinas sees the soul as a ‘principle of life’ which is intimately bound to a body. Together they form a non-contingent composition. In addition, the distinctive feature of the human soul is rationality, which implies that a human needs a mind to be what it is. However, this is not to say, as Descartes proposes, that the reason that I am a human is that I am fully self-conscious. On the contrary, I will show that self-consciousness is not necessarily a key to defining a human being. To that aim, and based on Aquinas’s views, I draw a distinction between what I will call ‘egos’ and ‘selves’.

In June 1846 complaints about the treatment of a Welsh clergyman at the privately run Haydock Lodge Asylum in England heralded a series of allegations about maltreatment of pauper patients at the institution. These prompted a number of Parliamentary reports on the institution. Allegations were also made about connections between the asylum and officials at the Poor Law Commission. This article demonstrates that many of the problems at Haydock Lodge relate to the character and personal circumstances of its first Superintendent, Charles Mott, a former Assistant Poor Law Commissioner. Despite this specific causation, the Haydock Lodge affair had a more general influence in raising once again questions about the propriety of entrusting the care of publicly funded patients to private institutions.

Further to the study by Neumärker and Bartsch (2003) of Karl Kleist (1879-1960), this short contribution based on archive material, cited for the first time, looks into Kleist’s motives for refusing an appointment as Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology at Leipzig University. This study comes to the conclusion that Kleist thought seriously of moving to Leipzig. However, the Saxony Ministry of People’s Education refused to make a definite financial commitment to the reconstruction and building work that Kleist considered essential. On the other hand, the authorities in Frankfurt am Main, where Kleist had been appointed 3 years earlier, evidently agreed to the funding he required if he was to remain there. This finally prompted him to turn down the Leipzig offer.

This classic text reproduces Emil Kraepelin’s inaugural lecture at the University of Dorpat in 1887. It represents one of the most succinct contemporary surveys of German psychiatric discourse in the 1880s. It also outlines Kraepelin’s own research priorities in the early years of his career, providing important historical background to the motives that drove him to place such great emphasis on (and hope in) experimental psychology. Contrary to our contemporary image of Kraepelin as a grand clinical nosologist, this text shows that he was much more of a diagnostician and experimental psychologist than historians have generally assumed. The document also reflects a wider ‘psychological turn’ in German psychiatry, away from patho-anatomic study - a turn that has often been overlooked in the historiographic literature.