ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Schizophrenia, Standardization, and Scientific Practices: Clinical Research in the Twentieth Century

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

Since the concept of schizophrenia was introduced in the early twentieth century, psychiatrists have disagreed about its diagnostic criteria, nosological classification, and underlying causes. While a substantial body of scholarship has explored the intellectual and conceptual history of these disagreements, less attention has been paid to the history of psychiatric research itself – its material basis, scientific practices, and institutional settings, as well as its cultural presumptions and normative basis. How have encounters between patients and clinicians, communities and researchers, society and scientists, shaped ideas about mental illness? This panel asks what we can learn about efforts to standardize and categorize schizophrenia through scientific practices, as well as resistance to these efforts, by examining shifting regimes of psychiatric research from the interwar period to the Cold War in the Global North and the Global South. By centering schizophrenia research practices this panel explores how local contexts, material possibilities and limitations, individual agency, and even coincidence and chance shaped ideas about disease concepts, prognosis, and recovery.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Ketil Slagstad, Insitute of the History of Medicine and Ethics in Medicine, Charité Berlin

Individual Presentations

• Schizophrenia, Society, and Family in a Cross-Cultural Context - Ana Antic, University of Copenhagen

• Computed Tomography and the Schizophrenic Brain, 1970s-1990s - Alfred Freeborn, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin

• Catatonia, Nitrogen, and the Laboratory Asylum in the Interwar Period - Ketil Slagstad, Insitute of the History of Medicine and Ethics in Medicine, Charité Berlin