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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:sh-54213 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Witting, Caroline |
| Publisher | Södertörns högskola, Institutionen för historia och samtidsstudier |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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