TY - CHAP
T1 - Asylum Statistics and the Psycho-Social Reality of the Hungarian Kingdom
AU - Lafferton, Emese
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - This chapter explores the grounds on which psychiatrists could legitimately build and spread their social criticism. Relying on published statistics and the author’s original survey of thousands of asylum patient files, Lafferton reconstructs the patient populations of three major mental asylums liable to use public services of mental care between 1850 and 1915. The analysis of the social parameters of the inmate population (including those of gender, age at the time of admission, marital status, religious affiliation, social and professional status), and the pathological medical categories assigned to them (distribution by various mental illnesses) reflects the Hungarian Kingdom’s social and cultural diversity and complexity, distorted in revealing ways by social, class and gender inequalities. In addition to the critical reassessment of several claims prevalent in late-nineteenth-century psychiatric literature and in recent historiography, Lafferton also underlines the importance of the degree of “modernisation,” urbanisation and “medicalisation” of the different social groups: the extent of the access to and reliance on medical services.
AB - This chapter explores the grounds on which psychiatrists could legitimately build and spread their social criticism. Relying on published statistics and the author’s original survey of thousands of asylum patient files, Lafferton reconstructs the patient populations of three major mental asylums liable to use public services of mental care between 1850 and 1915. The analysis of the social parameters of the inmate population (including those of gender, age at the time of admission, marital status, religious affiliation, social and professional status), and the pathological medical categories assigned to them (distribution by various mental illnesses) reflects the Hungarian Kingdom’s social and cultural diversity and complexity, distorted in revealing ways by social, class and gender inequalities. In addition to the critical reassessment of several claims prevalent in late-nineteenth-century psychiatric literature and in recent historiography, Lafferton also underlines the importance of the degree of “modernisation,” urbanisation and “medicalisation” of the different social groups: the extent of the access to and reliance on medical services.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85130948370&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-030-85706-6_7
DO - 10.1007/978-3-030-85706-6_7
M3 - Chapter
AN - SCOPUS:85130948370
T3 - Mental Health in Historical Perspective
SP - 291
EP - 328
BT - Mental Health in Historical Perspective
PB - Palgrave Macmillan
ER -