Abstract
About 1800, psychiatry was established as a medical discipline with special institutions (madhouses). Therefore, historiography of psychiatry focuses generally on the last 200 years. This contribution will also illustrate aspects of medical and cultural history, which nowadays are mostly supposed to be less important: the premodern concept of melancholy and hypochondria between humoral pathology, demonology, and psychology; the assessment of psychiatric illness as a "creative malady," even complementary to genius; the dialectics of psychiatric therapies between suppression and emancipation, which is especially prominent in the early nineteenth century in regard to "moral treatment" ( psychische Kur in German), a topic stressed vigorously by the "antipsychiatry" movement around 1970; the denunciation of patients and sections of the population by eugenics ( Rassenhygiene in German) and racism (especially toward the Jews) by psychiatrists. Finally, the miraculous mechanisms of mass hysteria of "normal" individuals are questioned.
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