Abstract
Abstract The French do not know the founder of psychiatry in their own country. All that most textbooks tell us about Philippe Pinel (1745–1826) is that he was the first to liberate the insane from their chains, at Bicetre Hospice in Paris at the height of the French Revolution. Yet recent scholarship and documentary evidence definitively discredit that legend, known in France as “Pinel’s gesture.” The facts do not support it, yet the legend persists. It has a life of its own because, like all fairytales, it hides a deeper meaning. This chapter explores the reasons why a crudely manufactured myth has overshadowed Pinel’ s innovative and creative achievement, leading one of the foremost French historians of psychiatry of our own age to announce a new attitude when he writes: “Our generation has stopped adoring [Pinel] and has begun to read him.”1
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