ABSTRACT
By concentrating on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and by limiting itself to Western Europe, this chapter attempts to show through three case studies not only the potential of such an analysis, but also the lacunas in current historiography. The three chosen objects - the straitjacket, the bed and the pill - offer diverse approaches and illustrate different master narratives of the historiography of psychiatry: the straitjacket represents confinement, the bed hospital culture, while the pill epitomises the so-called chemical revolution of the 1950s. In most museums dedicated to the history of medicine in general and to the history of psychiatry in particular, the story of madness is told to visitors through the straitjacket, which is presented as the natural 'witness-object' to speak about psychiatry. If the straitjacket and the bed were both based on artisanal know-how, the pill was inscribed in other frameworks from the early nineteenth century on.
