History of Psychiatry, Volume 33, Issue 2, Page 236-255, June 2022. In 1880 Carl Wernicke gave this plenary lecture at an annual meeting of German physicians and natural scientists. He used principles from his 1874 aphasia monograph to build a neural model of mental illness. He proposed that the brain keeps a record of experiences in distinct areas of the sensory and motor cortices in the form of memory images, which allows for recognition of objects and the planning of motor acts. He conjectured that imperfections, partial defects and complete loss of such memory images lead, respectively, to ..read more

History of Psychiatry, Volume 33, Issue 2, Page 127-142, June 2022. Ancient literature contains thoughts, observations and opinions about animals causing fear, disgust or hate that can be of great interest to scientists researching the problem of phobias, fears and anxieties in history. So in this article, it is argued that we can go as far back as ancient times in the research on the history of animal phobias (or, speaking more generally, in research on the entire spectrum of negative emotions evoked by animals in individuals or in entire social groups or societies). In that period, the pheno ..read more

History of Psychiatry, Volume 33, Issue 2, Page 200-216, June 2022. Dr Pownall was a surgeon, asylum proprietor and one-time mayor of Calne who had bouts of insanity. He had two serious bouts of violence when insane, and later murdered a servant, Louisa Cook, after his discharge from Northwoods Asylum as recovered. He was tried for murder and ended up in Broadmoor, where he died in 1882. There are extensive contemporary public accounts of the case, but detailed examination of the roles of the local chief magistrate, Purnell Barnsby Purnell, and Pownall’s brother-in-law and asylum doctor, Dr Og ..read more

History of Psychiatry, Volume 33, Issue 2, Page 217-229, June 2022. This essay draws on evidence in a late nineteenth-century court case and surviving medical notes to provide a case study of a hitherto unidentified case of Autism Spectrum Disorder. The case is particularly interesting in that it not only appears to be the first identification of historical ASD in a female, but also because the patient subsequently developed symptoms of psychosis suggestive of schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder. The unusual survival of detailed medical notes also throws light on the ways in which a diff ..read more

History of Psychiatry, Volume 33, Issue 2, Page 163-179, June 2022. Graduates from foreign medical schools (FMGs) began to staff US state psychiatric hospitals after World War II, and became increasingly associated with the poor quality of those institutions. Public and professional commentary on FMGs criticized their skills and suitability for the US healthcare system in the 1970s, at the same time that state hospitals were under increasing attack. By the 1980s and 1990s, the association between international medical graduates (as they became known) and underserved populations became an argum ..read more

History of Psychiatry, Volume 33, Issue 2, Page 180-199, June 2022. Historical studies on the institutionalization of the mentally ill have primarily relied on data for institutionalized patients rather than the population at risk. Consequently, the underlying factors of institutionalization are unclear. Using Swedish longitudinal microdata from 1900–59 reporting mental disorders, we examine whether supply factors, such as distance to institutions and number of asylum beds, influenced the risk of institutionalization, in addition to demand factors such as access to family. Institutionalization ..read more

History of Psychiatry, Volume 33, Issue 2, Page 143-162, June 2022. Gustav Specht (1860–1940) developed academic psychiatry in Erlangen. After studying medicine in Würzburg, Munich and Berlin, he became assistant medical director in the mental asylum of Erlangen. In 1897 he was appointed extraordinary, and in 1903 ordinary, Professor of Psychiatry. A good clinician and teacher, Specht worked during a time of paradigm change in psychiatry. He was an expert in chronic mania, and introduced the concept of the ‘grumbler’s delusion’. Paranoia he believed to be the core problem of psychopathology an ..read more

History of Psychiatry, Ahead of Print. The present study investigates the role of Taiwanese psychiatrists in turning neurasthenia into a culture-specific disease in the late twentieth century. It first delineates the shift in both explanatory models of psychoneuroses and patient population in post-World War II Taiwan. Neurasthenia became a focus of international attention in the 1970s and 1980s with the advance of cultural psychiatry, and, as China was closed to the outside world, Taiwanese psychiatrists were influential in framing the cultural meaning of neurasthenia. With the rise of post-so ..read more

History of Psychiatry, Ahead of Print. This article presents an introduction to Ludwig Binswanger’s Comments on Hermann Rorschach’s Psychodiagnostik, published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis in 1923, after Rorschach’s death in 1922. Binswanger, one of the most distinguished psychiatrists of the twentieth century and a close professional colleague and compatriot in the Swiss Psychiatric and Psychoanalytic Societies, was blazing new trails by incorporating turn-of-the-century phenomenology and experimental psychology into Swiss psychiatry. His comments, which have been noted for ..read more

History of Psychiatry, Ahead of Print. Past histories charting interactions between British healthcare and Aboriginal Australians have tended to be dominated by broad histological themes such as invasion and colonization. While such descriptions have been vital to modernization and truth telling in Australian historical discourse, this paper investigates the nineteenth century through the modern cultural lens of mental health. We reviewed primary documents, including colonial diaries, church sermons, newspaper articles, medical and burial records, letters, government documents, conference spee ..read more