Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 Inspecting Great Britain: German Psychiatrists' Views of British Asylums in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century
- 2 Permeating National Boundaries: European and American Influences on the Emergence of “Medico-Pedagogy” in Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain
- 3 Organizing Psychiatric Research in Munich (1903–1925): A Psychiatric Zoon Politicon between State Bureaucracy and American Philanthropy
- 4 Germany and the Making of “English” Psychiatry: The Maudsley Hospital, 1908–1939
- 5 Patterns in Transmitting German Psychiatry to the United States: Smith Ely Jelliffe and the Impact of World War I
- 6 “Beyond the Clinical Frontiers”: The American Mental Hygiene Movement, 1910–1945
- 7 Mental Hygiene in Britain during the First Half of the Twentieth Century: The Limits of International Influence
- 8 Psychiatry in Munich and Yale, ca. 1920–1935: Mutual Perceptions and Relations, and the Case of Eugen Kahn (1887–1973)
- 9 Explorations of Scottish, German, and American Psychiatry: The Work of Helen Boyle and Isabel Hutton in the Treatment of Noncertifiable Mental Disorders in England, 1899–1939
- 10 Welsh Psychiatry during the Interwar Years, and the Impact of American and German Inspirations and Resources
- 11 Alien Psychiatrists: The British Assimilation of Psychiatric Refugees, 1930–1950
- Selected Bibliography
- List of Contributors
- Index
4 - Germany and the Making of “English” Psychiatry: The Maudsley Hospital, 1908–1939
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 Inspecting Great Britain: German Psychiatrists' Views of British Asylums in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century
- 2 Permeating National Boundaries: European and American Influences on the Emergence of “Medico-Pedagogy” in Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain
- 3 Organizing Psychiatric Research in Munich (1903–1925): A Psychiatric Zoon Politicon between State Bureaucracy and American Philanthropy
- 4 Germany and the Making of “English” Psychiatry: The Maudsley Hospital, 1908–1939
- 5 Patterns in Transmitting German Psychiatry to the United States: Smith Ely Jelliffe and the Impact of World War I
- 6 “Beyond the Clinical Frontiers”: The American Mental Hygiene Movement, 1910–1945
- 7 Mental Hygiene in Britain during the First Half of the Twentieth Century: The Limits of International Influence
- 8 Psychiatry in Munich and Yale, ca. 1920–1935: Mutual Perceptions and Relations, and the Case of Eugen Kahn (1887–1973)
- 9 Explorations of Scottish, German, and American Psychiatry: The Work of Helen Boyle and Isabel Hutton in the Treatment of Noncertifiable Mental Disorders in England, 1899–1939
- 10 Welsh Psychiatry during the Interwar Years, and the Impact of American and German Inspirations and Resources
- 11 Alien Psychiatrists: The British Assimilation of Psychiatric Refugees, 1930–1950
- Selected Bibliography
- List of Contributors
- Index
Summary
English psychiatry was defined in relation to its German counterpart for much of the first half of the twentieth century. In British psychiatric writings, Germany served variously as a model of psychiatric organization and research, a source of training and manpower, or as a moral warning on the dangers of political corruption and the decadence of intellectual ambition. This paper does not try to explore the merits of German psychiatry in this period—it gladly passes that task on to the contributions of Eric Engstrom and Volker Roelcke. Rather it attempts to show how the idea of Germany served as a programmatic resource for individuals engaged in the reshaping of English psychiatry and it takes as its case study the early twentieth-century history of the Maudsley Hospital.
From its inception the Maudsley was deeply inspired by developments in German psychiatry. The original proposals for the hospital, developed by the London County Council (LCC) Asylums pathologist, Frederick Mott, were modelled on the university psychiatric clinics of Munich, Berlin, Halle, and Heidelberg. Mott had toured these clinics in 1907 and in his preface to that year's edition of the Archives of Neurology he paid generous praise to the German arrangements:
Fortunate indeed would be the community in which there was a fully equipped and well organised psychiatrical clinic, under the control of a University, and dedicated to the solution of such problems. The mere existence of such an institution would indicate that people were as much interested in endeavouring to increase the public sanity, as they were in the results of exploration of the uttermost parts of the earth or the discovery of a new star.
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- International Relations in PsychiatryBritain, Germany, and the United States to World War II, pp. 67 - 90Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2010