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. 2023 Dec;34(4):417-433.
doi: 10.1177/0957154X231194910. Epub 2023 Sep 10.

The psychopathic hospital

Robert Df Nathan  1
Affiliations

The psychopathic hospital

Robert Df Nathan. Hist Psychiatry. 2023 Dec.

Abstract

A new psychiatric institution emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the psychopathic hospital. This institution represented a significant development in the history of psychiatry, as it marked the profession's reorientation from asylum-based to hospital-based care, and in this way presaged the deinstitutionalization movement that would begin half a century later. Psychopathic hospitals were also an important marker of psychiatry's efforts to redefine its professional boundaries and respond to its vociferous critics. This entailed both a rapprochement with general medicine in an effort to assert its scientific bona fides and a redefinition of its scope of practice to absorb non-certifiable 'borderland' cases in order both to emphasize non-coercive treatment and to enlarge the profession's boundaries.

Keywords: Deinstitutionalization; modernization; professionalization; psychopathic hospital.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of conflicting interestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

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