History of Psychiatry: Madness,Science,Culture

As with other clinical phenomena, the historical analysis of the term, concepts and behaviours involved in the construction of 'depersonalization' should provide researchers with an essential frame for its empirical study, Before the term was coined in 1898, and under a variety of names, behaviours typical of 'depersonalization' were reported by Esquirol, Zeller, Billod, and Griesinger. The word dépersonnalisation derived from a usage in Amiel's Journal intime, was first used in a technical sense by Ludovic Dugas. The new disorder has since been explained as resulting from pathological changes in the sensory system, memory, affect, body image and self-experience. During the 1930s, evolutionary views became popular, particularly in the work of Mayer-Gross. The unclear conceptual boundaries of depersonalization still invite confusion and often enough fragments of what used to be its core-behaviour are used to diagnose the disorder. Depersonalization has of late become subsumed under the dissociative disorders. The definitional instability of the latter, however, has caused further complications to the study of depersonalization. It is recommended that the term is used to refer only to the original core-behaviour as this has shown adequate stability.

Water has long been considered an effective means of therapy for mental disorders. Its use, however, was divided along class lines during the nineteenth century. After presenting a brief background of the general conditions of the insane in Norway around the mid-nineteenth century when modem psychiatry entered the scene, I will present some examples of developments in hydrotherapy - fashionable bath resorts for the rich, and the use of prolonged baths as coercive treatment for asylum paupers.

Modern psychiatry was born in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. At that time French psychiatrists had much to learn. One of their interests was in recognizing the causes of madness which they divided into physical and moral. This article aims to describe this moment in the history of medicine and to demonstrate how ancient ideas were reworked by these alienists. Above all it is argued that alienists struggled with a kind of disease that was regarded as unacceptable at the time.