ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the history of mental hospitals in the western world. It turns to the early history of mental asylums in four western nations, France, Britain, the United States and Germany. In Britain, the Lunacy Act signified the beginning of the Age of the Asylum as well as the emergence of the psychiatric profession. By far the most well-known private asylum in early nineteenth-century Britain was York Retreat near the town of York. Soon the Retreat and moral treatment received international acclaim. The significance of clinics and hospitals for continuous and systematic research on mental disorders is difficult to overestimate. It was only after the large-scale establishment of institutional medical care that physicians had an adequate number of patients and forms of mental illness at their disposal to classify different mental illnesses. Finally, the chapter examines the development towards the medical explanation and management of madness in the nineteenth century.
