Tag: asylums
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The beginnings of humane psychiatry: Pinel and the Tukes
JMS PearceHull, England “It is perhaps not going too far to maintain that Pinel has been to eighteenth-century psychiatry what Newton was to its natural philosophy and Linnaeus to its taxonomy.”—George Rousseau, Historian, 1991 Although modern treatment of mental illness has its limitations, older methods of treatment were both crude and cruel. For centuries they…
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Hospital at Arles – Van Gogh, 1889
The famous Impressionist painter Van Gogh has had much personal experience with hospitals and asylums, admitted repeatedly in Arles and St Rémy for episodes of mental illness. Over 150 psychiatrists have variously attributed his mental condition to schizophrenia, bipolar disorders, syphilis, temporal lobe epilepsy, acute porphyria, or heavy metal poisoning—aggravated by malnutrition, overwork, insomnia, alcohol,…