ABSTRACT
The asylum, an institutional space devoted exclusively to the management of the mad, has in some respects a much longer history than is commonly realized. Hospitals for the sick and infirm had been established in the Byzantine Empire in the fifth century CE, quite soon after the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West. Graeco-Roman medicine had begun to be re-imported into Western Europe from the Arab world in the Middle Ages, partly in the aftermath of the Christianization of Spain and partly as the Crusades brought Europeans into contact with both Arab learning and with hospitals and asylums. Moral treatment, the key to the reformed asylum, seems to have emerged in quite similar guises in England, France, and Italy, and thence to have underpinned the movement to build whole networks of asylums at state expense. Germany had its barracks-asylums, and developed smaller clinics attached to universities, where interesting patients could be studied, and laboratory research pursued.
