Hungarian Psychiatry, Society and Politics in the Long Nineteenth Century

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xviii

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2. Introduction

   • Emese Lafferton

   Pages 1-17

3. Histories of Psychiatry and the Hungarian Model

   • Emese Lafferton

   Pages 19-99

4. The Bourgeois Family World of the Private Asylum: The Schwartzer Enterprise from 1850

   • Emese Lafferton

   Pages 101-146

5. The Kingdom in Miniature: Public Mental Asylums from the 1860s

   • Emese Lafferton

   Pages 147-191

6. The University Clinic and the Birth of Biological Psychiatry. Academic Research, Teaching and Therapy from the 1880s

   • Emese Lafferton

   Pages 193-244

7. Fragmenting Institutional Landscape. Alternatives of Specialised Institutions, Colonies and Family Care on the Turn-of-the-Century

   • Emese Lafferton

   Pages 245-289

8. Asylum Statistics and the Psycho-Social Reality of the Hungarian Kingdom

   • Emese Lafferton

   Pages 291-328

9. Invading the Public and the Private: The Hygiene of Everyday Life, Shell-Shock and the Politics of Turn-of-the-Century Psychiatric Expertise

   • Emese Lafferton

   Pages 329-368

10. Conclusion

    • Emese Lafferton

    Pages 369-384

11. Back Matter

    Pages 385-441

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This book provides the first comprehensive study of the history of Hungarian psychiatry between 1850 and 1920, placed in both an Austro-Hungarian and wider European comparative framework. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the book captures the institutional worlds of the different types of psychiatric institutions intertwined with the intellectual history of mental illness and the micro-historical study of everyday institutional practice. It uncovers the ways in which psychiatrists gradually organised themselves and their profession, defined their field and role, claimed expertise within the medical sciences, lobbied for legal reform and the establishment of psychiatric institutions, fought for university positions, the establishment of departments and specialised psychiatric teaching. Beyond this story of increasing professionalization, this study also explores how psychiatry became invested in social critique. It shows how psychiatry gradually moved beyond its closely defined disciplinary borders and became a public arena, with psychiatrists broadening their focus from individual patients to society at large, whether through mass publications or participation in popular social movements. Finally, the book examines how psychiatry began to influence the concept of mental health during the first decades of the twentieth century, against the rich social and cultural context of fin-de-siècle Budapest and the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy.  

• Austro-Hungarian
• Psychoanalysis
• Fin-de-siecle
• Modernity
• History of medicine
• Multicultural
• Psychiatric institutions
• Social critique
• Urban population
• Habsburg studies

“The volume under review here addresses several interrelated and less-developed dimensions of histoficization: the cfitical history of psychiatry, the inception of public health in East Central Europe, and the interrelation of welfare policy and nation-building. Choosing the nineteenth century as a timeline to frame her histofical reconstruction, Emese L afferton succeeds in interconnecting public health and psychiatry … .” (Victoria Schmidt, Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung, Vol. 72 (4), 2023)​

• Department of History, Central European University, Vienna, Austria

  Emese Lafferton

Emese Lafferton is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the Central European University, Vienna, Austria. She has published a range of articles and book chapters in English on various aspects of the history of psychiatry, medicine and racial sciences in the long nineteenth century. In addition, she has edited several books and thematic journal issues.

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