The Wittenauer Heilstätten in Berlin: a case record study of psychiatric patients in Germany, 1919–1960

Papers from the Sixth Hannah Conference

“…In a manner analogous to Andrea Dörries' work on the German psychiatry reform during the Weimar, Nazi and post-war German regimes (Dörries and Beddies, 2003) or Rivera-Garza's work on the status of mental health services in post-revolutionary Mexico (Rivera-Garza, 2003), Ablard explores how strange alliances could develop between populist and/or nationalist movements and mental health service provision, alliances that could have a profound impact on the day-to-day lives of patients and practitioners. Japanese psychiatrists self-consciously tried to emulate Western European and North American levels of incarceration and treatment modalities.…”

Del Hospício de Pedro II al Hospital Nacional de Alienados: cien años de historias (1841-1944)

“…Nuestro proyecto pretende avanzar sobre todo por la investigación de la relación entre teoría y práctica psiquiátrica, percibiendo las recepciones y usos de categorías diagnósticas y teorías en circulación en la praxis clínica, revelada a su vez en los libros de observación de pacientes. De ahí la relevancia de un enfoque que cruza lo cuantitativo y lo cualitativo en el estudio de las instituciones, ampliamente basadas en la exploración de los expedientes clínicos de las instituciones psiquiátricas (Molina, 2009;Huertas, 2012;Dörries;Beddies, 2003). Traemos una mirada más de cerca a la praxis clínica, cómo acciona ciertos patrones clasificatorios, y cómo amalgama el corpus teórico con concepciones de la moralidad vigente (Berrios, 2012).…”

Dr William Saunders Hallaran and psychiatric practice in nineteenth-century Ireland

“…Consistent with Dr Cullen's approach, Dr Hallaran's distinction between organic and non-organic factors in the aetiology of mental illness was to consolidate the foundation for much subsequent progress in determining the causes of insanity throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Syphilis, for example, was cited as a major cause of admission to psychiatric institutions throughout nineteenth-century Europe [7,8], despite the fact that accurate diagnosis was not possible prior to the work of Wasserman [9]. Nonetheless, Dr Hallaran undertook to gather the first systematic data on the causes of psychiatric admissions in Ireland, and identified, as best he could, that venereal disease accounted for a lower proportion of admissions in Ireland [10,11].…”