Psychiatry can be called the darkest chapter in the history of clinical medicine. For several centuries, it has come a hard way: it took time for patients to learn to show humanity. What insane methods have been used to “cure” insanity in the past?
In 1808, the German physician Johann Reil coined the name “psychiatry” and subsequently received the status of its founder. But in fact, it all started with the Sumerian magicians who fought the madness with spells and amulets.
By the XNUMXth century BC. ancient physicians decided that the nature of insanity is “divine” or “demonic”. And around the same time they learned to identify the symptoms of psychosis. Wealthy madmen began to be locked up at home, the poor in prison.
Possessed and saints
The early Christian society built hospices and hospitals for the mentally ill and other suffering. But with the development of church dogmas, mercy came to an end. People with mental problems were considered possessed by the devil, driven away, killed, at best they found refuge in monasteries.
Sometimes the possessed were “treated”: they tied them up and poured cold water on the top of their heads. The Inquisition did not stand on ceremony with them at all. However, some mentally ill people could be revered as saints. In Russia they were called holy fools.
High security hospitals
In 1247, the brotherhood of “Our Lord from Bethlehem” built a hostel on the outskirts of London, where, over time, “sorrowful in mind” were sheltered. And then something went wrong. The building was transferred to the Bethlehem Royal Hospital – the same “Bedlam”, which forever became synonymous with a mess. This is where the real madness began!
Patients were kept in terrible mud and crowded, beaten, put on a chain. In 1675, Bedlam moved to a new building, but the order remained the same. Unless the authorities began to let everyone who wants to admire the evil “psychos” for money.
Similar establishments flourished everywhere. In France, the Hotel Dieu and Bicêtre, where people were kept in cages, in Austria, the Narrenturm, in the USA, the Bellevue, and these are just the most famous. In Russia, by decree of Peter I, “dollgauzes” were opened – prison-type madhouses.
Who knows how long the bullying would have lasted if not for the French Revolution and psychiatrist Philippe Pinel. In 1792, he removed the chains from the prisoners of Bicetre and released them from their cells. The reforms were also supported by other progressive clinics. However, a strict regime was maintained in the institutions of the Old and New Worlds until the middle of the XNUMXth century.
Mad Therapy
All this time, the patients of “psychiatric hospitals” were not treated at all. True, the doctors acted at random: “Let’s try this strange method: what if it helps?”
Blood Purification
About a hundred years before Pinel, his compatriot Jean Denis thought of replacing the bad blood of the “obsessed” with the blood of an innocent lamb. The first test subject somehow survived and even gained partial sanity. The second was unlucky, and the doctor was executed for premeditated murder. But the idea didn’t die.
Benjamin Rush, the father of American psychiatry, began to transfuse patients with the blood of healthy people. Many died from sepsis.
sedatives
Meanwhile, in psychiatric hospitals, a gyrator, a board suspended from the ceiling, was being used with might and main. Relatively peaceful lunatics were tied to it and untwisted with all their might. After such a “carousel” they mercilessly vomited, which was considered extremely useful.
The same Rush designed a tranquilizer chair in which the violent were “calmed down” – and the “session” could last from several days to several months. Arms and legs were fixed with straps, a wooden “hood” was lowered over the head, and a waste bucket was placed under the hole in the seat.
Notice Sir Benjamin was not a sadist. On the contrary, he insisted that the so-called “feeble-minded” were not “freaks” but sick. He wrote many scientific papers and came up with occupational therapy, which is still successfully used today.
Water procedures
At the beginning of the XNUMXth century, the Dutch physiologist van Helmont discovered glimmers of reason in an imbecile who nearly drowned while swimming. The doctor made a kind of torture wheel, which allowed him to methodically drown the tied patients. Not to death, but almost: to survive the shock and become normal.
In 1770, Samuel Willard, founder of the first insane asylum in the United States, improved on the ancient design. The mentally ill were immersed in a pond in a special tank until they began to choke. No noticeable improvements were observed. Nevertheless, adherents of “hydrotherapy” arrived.
Both psychotics and neurotics were put in steam ovens and hot baths to expel “harmful” fluids. Ice baths slowed down the blood flow and thus stopped the “violence”. To prevent patients from jumping out, a canvas was pulled from above.
Merciless Psychosurgery
Craniotomy in modern neurosurgery is a jewelry operation indicated for tumors and craniocerebral injuries. But archaeological finds show that even ancient healers made a hole in the head of a madman with something like a rotator to release evil spirits. Not surprisingly, most patients immediately went to the next world.
The descendants were also curious about what was going on in people’s heads. At the turn of the XNUMXth-XNUMXth centuries, Franz Josef Gall connected the human psyche with the structure of the skull and developed the theory of phrenology. According to the provisions of this pseudoscience, the structure of our skull is directly related to our psyche. Gall himself did not harm anyone, but his followers began to redraw skulls in the hope of eliminating mental disorders.
In 1935, the Portuguese neurosurgeon Egas Moniz stated that excision of the frontal lobes of the brain helps with severe mental disorders. After all, a third of those operated on “recovered” (that is, they became quiet and submissive).
Risky experiments caused an uproar in scientific circles. However, Moniz still received the Nobel Prize, and prefrontal lobotomy began to be practiced everywhere. Hastily trained doctors rapturously bored skulls and cut brains, leaving patients in a near-vegetative state. This is exactly what happened, for example, with Rosemary Kennedy, the older sister of the legendary US President John F. Kennedy. She lagged behind in development and became unpredictable with age. When the girl was 23 years old, her parents, worried about her mood swings, decided to have an operation. As a result, Rosemary stopped talking, her intelligence decreased to the level of the intelligence of a two-year-old child.
In the 1950s, the negative consequences of such operations became too obvious, and the method was officially banned in many countries, including the USSR.
High tech
It would seem that scientific and technological progress was bound to cause the flourishing of humane psychiatry. But no. In 1934, the neuroscientist Laszlo Meduna passed an electric current through the patient’s brain, and he went on the mend.
Further experiments also turned out to be more or less successful, and a craze for electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), or, more simply, electric shock, began. Only now Meduna used ECT for catatonic syndrome, and in American clinics she was prescribed to almost everyone in a row.
Lethargy, loss of personality, partial memory loss are just a few of the consequences of electric shock torture. Now, ECT is resorted to in extreme cases, but the method has changed in many ways.
Trait pharmacology
Do not think that mentally ill people have not tried to treat conservatively. They were stuffed with … bleached, hellebore, laxatives, opiates. There was no sense, but they did not live long.
Pharmacology nevertheless developed: sleeping pills, barbiturates, insulin appeared. The latter was extremely interested in the Berlin psychiatrist Manfred Sackel. In 1933, he proposed the treatment of schizophrenics with insulin shock therapy. That is, to inject horse doses of insulin, from which a hypoglycemic coma occurred, from which not everyone came out. The revolutionary approach was accepted with a bang and is still being practiced in some places.
In 1952, the first antipsychotic chlorpromazine was invented, followed by a more abrupt medicine – haloperidol. Despite the long list of side effects (burning, swelling, spasms, palpitations, movement disorders, hormonal disruptions, etc.), both drugs were greeted with applause. They are used even now – as civilized deterrents.
Of course, modern psychiatry is very far from the former barbarism. The mentally ill are not tortured, they are not chained, they are not kept in cages. Two main methods are used in treatment – psychopharmacology and psychotherapy. There is a scientific and practical base, research continues. But the human psyche remains terra incognita even today.