ABSTRACT
Through much of the nineteenth century, “moral treatment”—a term fi rst used by William Tuke in 1796, and by Philippe Pinel in 1801 (traitment moral)—was considered correct psychiatric practice. This concept of treatment meshed with the concept of mental illness as “moral insanity.” Like most concepts framed in the specialized idiom of psychiatry, “moral treatment” does not lend itself to clear defi nition. Historians of psychiatry characterize the method as “optimistic,” even though it rests on a theoretical commitment to “a physiological basis for mental disorder: insanity was caused by brain damage.... The notion that mental illness resulted from physical impairment was rarely challenged.”2
