ABSTRACT
An important principle in the treatment of psychiatric patients in the years around 1900 was the continuous supervision of the sick. It is very important to stress that the changes in the treatment of the mentally ill were related to changes in the social conditions of the insane, as society moved from an agrarian to an industrial economy. The most distinctive similarity with the treatment of the somatically diseased was that almost all patients were put to bed. ‘Moral treatment’ was first used by psychiatrists in England during the second half of the eighteenth century, but came to Sweden especially via German authors and practitioners. The 1820s were a decade of great reform in the Swedish mental hospital system, as in several other countries. In 1896, the influential psychiatrist Bror Gadelius introduced Freud’s and A. O. Breuer’s theory of hysteria in a Swedish medical context, but he thought it was too narrow to be useful.
