ABSTRACT
Each of these examples illustrates how contests over the division of labour within the psychiatric profession were wrapped up with issues pertaining to the spatial organization of psychiatric practice. This chapter explores the claims and strategies that academic psychiatrists in Germany used to wrest control over psychiatric research and training from their alienist colleagues. It argues that this division of professional labour involved disputes about the geographic organization of psychiatric administration and the emplacement and cultivation of certain clinical practices on hospital wards. The chapter explores what was at stake in the disputes involving university clinics in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It utilizes the reform program of Wilhelm Griesinger and his model of the urban asylum to outline the discursive fields across which these disputes unfolded. Urban asylums would also be relatively small institutions, projecting the image of a hospital and characterized by ‘incessant, round-the-clock observation and care’.
