How Stories of Mental Illness Were Told in Medical Journals (1840s-1880s)

• In Event: Medical Humanities III: Narrating the Psyche: Representations of Hypnosis, Mental Illness, and Postpartum Depression in Russian Literature

Abstract

This paper considers the portrayal of mental illness in case histories that appeared in non-specialized medical journals, before psychiatry as a discipline became more professionalized in the 1880s. In this critical time when mental illness was just starting to be considered a medical (rather than spiritual) phenomenon, I will examine how psychiatric and psychological disturbances were narrativized through a new framework. I will pay particular attention to the limitations psychiatrists were encountering in both observing and depicting interiority, and the different approaches taken by different journals and doctors to approach this problem.

Author

• Giulia Dossi, St Olaf College