This book is the first to explore memory, misremembering, forgetting, and anniversaries in the history of psychiatry and mental health. It challenges simplistic representations of the callous nature of mental health care in the past, while at the same time eschewing a celebratory and uncritical marking of anniversaries and individuals. Asking critical questions of the early Whiggish histories of mental health care, the book problematizes the idea of a shared professional and institutional history, and the abiding faith placed in the reform of medicine, administration, and even patients. It contends that much post-1800 legislation drafted to ensure reform, acted to preserve beliefs about the ‘bad old days’ and a ‘brighter future’ in the state memories of imperial powers, which in turn exported these notions around the world. Conversely, the collection demonstrates the variety of remembering and forgetting, building on recent interest in the ideological and cultural linkages between past and present in international psychiatric practice. In this way, it seeks to trace the pathways of memory, exploring the direction of travel, and the perpetuation, remodeling, and uprooting of recollection.Chapter “The New Socialist Citizen and ‘Forgetting’ Authoritarianism: Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Revolution in Socialist Yugoslavia” is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer. com.

Looks at a range of different sources, both institutional and private, usual and unusual, that can be used in writing the history of psychiatry and interrogates and analyses how they can be used so that the reader can get a sense of the range and complexity of the subject. Every student of history has to engage with sources and the history of medicine is very solidly popular - it will be useful for students to see how historians use different sources to interrogate one aspect of the history of medicine. There is nothing out there that discusses the range and breadth of sources available for the study of such a subject that is often difficult to interrogate at other than an institutional level, but which is becoming increasingly important.

This book explores medical and health periodicals of the nineteenth century: their contemporary significance, their readership, and how historians have approached them as objects of study. From debates about women doctors in lesser-known titles such as the Medical Mirror, to the formation of professional medical communities within French and Portuguese periodicals, the contributors to this volume highlight the multi-faceted nature of these publications as well as their uses to the historian. Medical periodicals – far from being the preserve of doctors and nurses – were also read by the general public. Thus, the contributions collected here will be of interest not only to the historian of medicine, but also to those interested in nineteenth-century periodical culture more broadly. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Media History.

Looks at a range of different sources, both institutional and private, usual and unusual, that can be used in writing the history of psychiatry and interrogates and analyses how they can be used so that the reader can get a sense of the range and complexity of the subject. Every student of history has to engage with sources and the history of medicine is very solidly popular - it will be useful for students to see how historians use different sources to interrogate one aspect of the history of medicine. There is nothing out there that discusses the range and breadth of sources available for the study of such a subject that is often difficult to interrogate at other than an institutional level, but which is becoming increasingly important.

This book explores medical and health periodicals of the nineteenth century: their contemporary significance, their readership, and how historians have approached them as objects of study. From debates about women doctors in lesser-known titles such as the Medical Mirror, to the formation of professional medical communities within French and Portuguese periodicals, the contributors to this volume highlight the multi-faceted nature of these publications as well as their uses to the historian. Medical periodicals - far from being the preserve of doctors and nurses - were also read by the general public. Thus, the contributions collected here will be of interest not only to the historian of medicine, but also to those interested in nineteenth-century periodical culture more broadly. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Media History.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book explores how the body was investigated in the late nineteenth-century asylum in Britain. As more and more Victorian asylum doctors looked to the bodily fabric to reveal the 'truth' of mental disease, a whole host of techniques and technologies were brought to bear upon the patient's body. These practices encompassed the clinical and the pathological, from testing the patient's reflexes to dissecting the brain. Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum takes a unique approach to the topic, conducting a chapter-by-chapter dissection of the body. It considers how asylum doctors viewed and investigated the skin, muscles, bones, brain, and bodily fluids. The book demonstrates the importance of the body in nineteenth-century psychiatry as well as how the asylum functioned as a site of research, and will be of value to historians of psychiatry, the body, and scientific practice.