ABSTRACT
In 1853 the Report of the Commissioners in Lunacy defined the province of the medical superintendent of the public asylum. The consequences were profound, and led to what a modern medical historian has called the division of psychiatrists into two groups of specialists within the specialty, each with different experience of a different type and class of patient – and even with its own journal – which has persisted more or less to this day and left its mark not only on the practice but even on the theory of psychiatry. In historical perspective, then, a bird’s eye view of psychiatric journals facilitates an understanding of their complex development from several sources. In the mid-nineteenth century the unity of the first stream was split by the rise of professional psychiatric associations whose journals were focused principally on institutional matters.
