Würdig einer liebevollen Pflege

In this comprehensive study of institutions for mental patients in nineteenth-century Württemberg, Angela Roth argues that the institutional psychiatry of the time was not characterized by a single, monolithic set of principles and practices. Despite some important continuities, the history of a psychiatric institution, she declares, is often the history of its directors and their often-different convictions. The director was supposed to be a majestic figure, a stern but fair father-surrogate for the patients, and this stress on a larger-than-life personality no [End Page 161] doubt encouraged directors to tailor their practices in individualized, even idiosyncratic ways. Roth illustrates her thesis by detailed examinations of the three asylums Zwiefalten, Winnenthal, and Schussenried and their many directors. Although she devotes much attention to the differences, one comes away from this book with a stronger sense of the broader continuities of asylum management and ideas about the nature of insanity

Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · Medical History and Research · Medicine · Mental Health and Psychiatry