Troubled Minds, or Psychiatry in Vilnius in the Second Half of the 19th Century

Abstract

This article presents an overview of the development of psychiatric centres in Vilnius in the second half of the long 19th century. The author analyses how, having undergone a whole range of infrastructural and conceptual changes, this branch of medicine was transformed from being a series of Medieval practices based on the forced isolation of patients to a science acknowledging modern methods of treatment. The most changes could be seen in the period from 1903 to 1905, when the Vilnius District Hospital, the largest psychiatric asylum in the Russian Empire, was established. This period coincided with the leadership of the new institution’s first director Nikolai Krainskii. It was then that the principles of non-restraint and the ideas of cultivating a patient’s work activities and social skills, which had been formulated in Western Europe at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, were implemented. On the other hand, the author also tries to show how, under the effects of degeneration theory, psychiatry in the Russian Empire adopted a conservative political bias, which seemed to be effective in constructing discriminatory models of interethnic relations. The conclusion arising from this research is that in Vilnius, much like in other multiethnic Imperial border cities, psychiatric asylums served not only as medical institutions but also as statistical centres. Data about patients collected each year by the clinics and then passed on to the Medical Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs was a potentially useful tool for the stigmatisation of entire local ethnic communities.