The purpose of this essay is to examine the patients who were cared for at Stockholm's psychiatric hospital during three periods in history: 1890–1895, 1905–1910 and 1920–1925. The variables examined in the statistical part of the essay are the number of newly admitted patients per period and the diagnoses these people receive. The second part of the essay takes a closer look at how patients from different payment classes are described in the application documents. The focus has been on compiling positively and negatively value-laden words to see which and how many words are used and whether there are differences between the different classes and genders. Another class aspect that has been investigated is how daily life in the hospital has differed between the classes.           The findings show that the number of patients per year is constantly increasing. There is only a small change between the first and the second survey period, from 1910 until and during the years 1920–1925, an enormous change takes place. Many people in the country are in line to be admitted to a hospital, which means that patients who are not judged as seriously ill or as a danger to themselves and others are discharged at a high rate. The diagnostic system undergoes several changes during the examined period, which makes it difficult to follow individual diagnoses over time.           The discourse analysis of the application documents shows that the men in the first class were the ones who were given by far the best reviews, both by relatives and by the chief physician. The focus was on their intelligence and good mood. First-class women also generally received good marks, but they commented more on her calmness and dignity, completely in line with the bourgeois ideal that prevailed then. Third-class patients did not enjoy the same amount of positive words at all. Their bodies and ability to work arouse the most interest in the doctor and the amount of information about their background is less. Everyday life also separates the classes. Tasks, leisure activities and food are adapted to the classes' previous lives to facilitate care and read justment to society, which means that in the first class you devote a lot of time to reading and writing, while in the third class you work with the physical operation of the hospital. The food would also mimic the one you were used to before, which meant that the food for first class was more than twice as expensive per person per day compared to the food you ate in third class.

The purpose of this study is to expand and variegate the general history of psychiatric care in Sweden in the late nineteenth century. My objects of interest are the first two head doctors of Stockholm’s hospital and their handwritten annual reports to the directorate of the hospital from the year of 1862 to the year of 1889. During this time the psychiatric care in Sweden went through a number of changes. Laws against treating patients of the asylums with physical restraint and force were passed, and humanitarian and philanthropic movements were a big part of these changes. In Sweden, the psychiatric care was expanding at this time. The old asylums were condemned by humanitarian intellectuals for its horrible conditions, and the doctors called out for new modern asylums. The modern day general history of the expansion of asylums is often in some way linked to Michel Foucault’s theory of the psychiatric asylum as an institution of social control. One of the main undertakings in this essay is to test this theory in the context of a late nineteenth century asylum of Stockholm. Another ambition in this essay is to establish which other characteristic structures of the nineteenth century that appear to have influenced the psychiatric care. Testing Foucault’s theory of social control has in this study proven to call for the need of additional theories concerning both class and gender structures. To expose the nuances of the general history of the asylum I have been using a microhistorical approach, while still integrating with the macro-leveled general history and the control theory of Michel Foucault.Focus in this research is on the two first head doctors of Stockholm’s first real asylum. In this essay, I analyse their description of patient labour and the use of physical restraint/force methods as treatments. The results of my research show that the upholding of social control and moral standards was a big part of the head doctors profession during the second half of the nineteenth century in the Swedish asylum. The results also show that the patients were treated differently based on gender and which of the three different payment classes of the asylum that they belonged to.

The aim of the paper was to identify tendencies in the type of descriptions, categories, and identities that the doctors at the mental hospital Stockholm’s hospital gave to the mentally ill patients. The time period was chosen for a few specific reasons, one being Bror Gadelius, then chief physician at the mental hospital and his ambitions for a humanistic care of the mentally ill. The other reason is that this period has been forgotten in Swedish history of mental health care as it fell between the 18th and 19th century ‘surveillance and control’, and on the other hand a period of electrical treatments, lobotomies,and sterilisations to ‘treat’ mental illness and fix society during 1930-1950. In the paper, two theories are used to be able to discern tendencies and different attitudes from the doctors in the patient records. The first is the intersectional perspective with some main categories such as Gender, Class, Body, and Sexuality, but also smaller categories that I discovered during the research. These are somewhat abstract yet self-explanatory: Curable/Incurable, meaning whether the attitude in the records suggests that there was any chance for the patient to get well. Talking/Not talking, where the patient's ability or unwillingness to talk to the doctor changes how the patient is described, and finally Docile/Resistant, which means that the patient is described according to how they behave in accordance with the norms of the mental hospital. The second theory is about objective medicine, which developed with the natural sciences, and the need to be scientifically accurate and to be able to define what disease is, what it looks like and its dimensions. However, when objective medicine developed, it was based on a subjective basis, and therefore being ill meant being 'ugly' and not conforming to societal norms. The two theories work well together because they both highlight historically changing meanings within patients' categories and given identities. Although these are two major theories, the paper is still a micro-historical study, I wanted to get up close to the source material and thoroughly examine the different ways in which patients could be described in the mental hospital. And I believe that it is possible, even with a small study of ten patient records, to provide some nuances of how the doctors viewed the mentally ill patients in the early 20th century.