The Disease of the Soma or the Psyche?
The Interpretations of Madness in the Medical Case Histories of the University of Pest in the Early Nineteenth Century
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15170/PAAA.2022.09.02.05.Keywords:
psychiatry, case history, university, clinic, mental asylumAbstract
The article examines a previously uncharted territory of medical history in Hungary, the early history of psychology and psychiatry in an age which lacked the appropriate institutional means to isolate and care for the mentally ill. Nevertheless, there were increasing efforts to find a place for those afflicted with different mental maladies within the developing system of healthcare from the second half of the eighteenth century. As the remaining sources testify, several of them were taken to the teaching clinic of the University of Pest, where medical students were expected to take detailed case histories, in which they recorded the anamnesis, the current status of the patient, a diagnosis, the progress, and the possible outcome of the disease. This relatively large body of materials
offers us a unique glimpse into how mental illnesses were identified, perceived, and treated in early nineteenth-century Hungary.
By looking at the formalized and standardized practices of case history writing from a comparative perspective, examining sources from the teaching clinics of the universities of Pest and Edinburgh, as well as the mental asylums in Vienna, Prague, and York, the paper attempts to reconstruct the physicians’ gaze and the patients’ perspective and decode how madness was approached and understood in medical practice.
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