Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: The Bicêtre Hospital

  • 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…