Poor, Sick, and Mad: Treating the Mentally Ill in the Hungarian Hospitals of the Brothers of Mercy (1740–1830)

Abstract

Abstract The paper addresses the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century practices of care provision for the mentally ill in Hungarian hospitals run by the Brothers of Mercy, highlighting the connections between illness and poverty, and the approaches taken towards the treatment of mental illness throughout this period. Even though we cannot talk about standardized care and a systematic therapeutic regime having emerged by the early nineteenth century, the practice of registering and isolating those perceived as mentally ill within hospitals is already detectable. Besides the social background of the patients, the remaining documents (patient statistics, registries, and regulations) enable us to examine how mental illnesses were named and classified in the hospitals of the Order. There are references, moreover, to the isolation and division of these patients into different classes based as much on their social and financial backgrounds as on their mental state. A survey of the documents of hospital administration, alongside narrative sources that reflect the daily routine of the Order’s hospitals (e.g., newspapers, medical topographies, travelogues), highlights the problems of medicalization and the pursuit of specialized care for this severely marginalized and stigmatized subgroup of hospital patients. They also offer a unique glimpse into early strategies of care provided by the Church at a time when the medico-political authorities were only beginning to address the problem in the Habsburg monarchy.