The modern mental hospital in late nineteenth-century Germany and Austria

Abstract

This chapter examines two contrasting approaches to the challenge of improving the asylum’s image. One modelled the asylum on the rural village or suburban neighbourhood, in order to create the impression, or the image, that the mental hospital partook of the freedom and normality of the familiar outside world. The other approach was marked by a new understanding of the visual imagery of the villa asylum. Public relations were a recurring preoccupation among Austrian and German asylum psychiatrists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the late nineteenth century, most psychiatric authorities in Germany and Austria saw the key to the benign, ‘free’ treatment of the insane in the ‘villa’ or ‘cottage’ system of asylum planning. In the face of attacks from an early anti-psychiatry movement, they saw asylum architecture as a vital tool for convincing the public that asylums were not places of secrecy, cruelty, and injustice.