ABSTRACT
How is past psychiatry both seen and obscured? In this volume, we contend that psychiatric practices, as well as those who have been made subject to its regimes, become more visible when we consider both the material and visual cultures produced through and by psychiatric institutions, and also the later representations of these as they are embodied in museums, collections and displays. The more elusive fragments from the world of mental health constitute the basis of this series of individual investigations into past psychiatry. We argue here that the themes of material culture, museums and public display intersect with the dominant scholarship in current histories of psychiatry in new and productive ways. Histories of psychiatry have, broadly speaking, drawn heavily upon textual materials such as the extensive archival remains of institutional medical cultures of the nineteenth century in the form of patient clinical case notes. This collection departs from that tradition and instead takes objects as its central focus. In this way, our collective endeavour is to make visible and audible different views of past psychiatry.
