American psychiatry: a tortured history
HistoryExtra podcast
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What Happened in the Early Years of the Asylums
In the early years hospitals did seem to restore a number of people, I think the earliest alienists were often quite charismatic figures who encouraged their staff. It was really a kind of Christian turn the other cheek thing, mental patients didn't necessarily respond nicely but when you treated them nicely they might well attack you or express verbally their discontent and remain in a shell so teaching attendants who had a lot of day-to-day contact with the patient to treat them with kindness seemed to have been genuinely part of things. But by the last third of the 19th century we had asylums with a thousand two thousand four thousand eventually by the early 20th century as many as 10 or 12 thousand patients
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