History of Psychiatry Podcast Series
Activity Overview
Episode publication activity over the past year
Episodes
7.2 Roots And Routes
06 Dec 2016
Contributed by Lukas
This podcast looks at the roots of asylums in hospitals or infirmaries as well as private madhouses, but it focuses on workhouses to illustrate that h...
7.1 Numbers
29 Nov 2016
Contributed by Lukas
When we think about the history of psychiatry we probably envisage large institutional buildings that can look like military barracks or even prisons,...
6.2 Bedlam Part 2 Cruelty Or Cure
22 Nov 2016
Contributed by Lukas
This podcast carries on from last week’s, asking: Were Bethlem’s staff negligent and cruel? Did it do little to cure its inmates? The conclusion i...
6.1 Bedlam Part 1 A Corrupt Freak Show
15 Nov 2016
Contributed by Lukas
This is the first of two podcasts about the only public lunatic asylum in England for centuries: St Mary of Bethlehem Hospital in London, usually know...
5.4 The Familiarity Of Madness
08 Nov 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Given the preference for extra-mural care shown in some parts of Britain in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, this podcast asks whether what...
5.3 Domestic Or Institutional Options
01 Nov 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Differences in rates of institutionalization between England on the one hand and Scotland, Wales, and Ireland on the other are at the heart of this po...
5.2 Private Madhouses
25 Oct 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Public madhouses did not become common until the mid-nineteenth century. Most institutional provision in what were called ‘madhouses’ was private ...
5.1 Domestic Care And Parish Poor Relief
18 Oct 2016
Contributed by Lukas
When we think about modern mental healthcare we probably think of clinics and hospitals funded by the state. But at the start of the eighteenth centur...
4.4 The Pharmacological Revolution
11 Oct 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Drugs are central to the ways modern clinicians handle mental disorders. But more or less consistently effective medicines for specific conditions are...
4.3 Surgery And Early Drug Treatments
04 Oct 2016
Contributed by Lukas
The nineteenth century saw a mixture of traditional remedies and the selective application of some of the methods associated with moral therapy. The f...
4.2 Moral Therapy And The Origins Of Psychological Treatment
27 Sep 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Physical treatments dominated sixteenth and seventeenth century mental healthcare. One important change was a greater role for psychological treatment...
4.1 Holistic And Heroic Remedies
20 Sep 2016
Contributed by Lukas
How have therapies for mental ailments changed over time? Today’s treatments for mental illness revolve around drugs and psychological therapy. For...
3.3 Freud And The Psyche
13 Sep 2016
Contributed by Lukas
If the nineteenth century had been mostly about physiology and somatogenic interpretations of mental problems, the early twentieth century was the gol...
3.2 Brain And Body
06 Sep 2016
Contributed by Lukas
The nineteenth century in Britain belongs to materialist or somatogenic interpretations of the causes of mental problems, founded on scientific advanc...
3.1 From Humours To Nerves
30 Aug 2016
Contributed by Lukas
The theme for this section of podcasts is the shifting balance between organic or somatic causes and mental or psychological ones. As new discoveries ...
2.4 Madness, Witchcraft, And Religion
23 Aug 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Early modern Europe saw an unprecedented craze for hunting, prosecuting, and executing witches, tens of thousands of whom were burned. It was widely b...
2.3 Describing and identifying mental problems: lay and legal language
16 Aug 2016
Contributed by Lukas
This week's podcast explores the ways in which mental illness has been identified and described. The popular, vernacular, or 'street' vocabulary of m...
2.2 Mind And Body
09 Aug 2016
Contributed by Lukas
One of the themes of these podcasts is that the boundaries between medicine and other disciplines in the past were much less clear cut than nowadays a...
2.1 Melancholy And Mania The Main Classifications
02 Aug 2016
Contributed by Lukas
In this block of podcasts I’m going to look again at the language used to describe mental problems, the ways lay and professional people identified ...
1.2 An Historian’s Approach To Psychiatry The Aims Of The Series
19 Jul 2016
Contributed by Lukas
This podcast is about what historians do and what they can bring to an understanding of mental medicine. I talk a little about myself, set out what yo...
1.1 Psychiatry And Its Subject
08 Jul 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Today’s podcast outlines what makes psychiatry a distinctive medical discipline with a special image, primarily because it deals with something we c...