Editorial Introduction

During the nineteenth century there were not many treatments for people suffering mental disorders. And those that did emerge usually disappeared fairly promptly for one reason or another. In the first quarter of the century phrenology was the great white hope. In the second quarter moral treatment was developed and expanded throughout the mental hospitals of the Western world. In the latter half of the century psychiatric ideas were bankrupt and there was deep therapeutic pessimism. This was largely because of the relentless development of the scientific approach which did not apply easily to people and to madness. By the end of the century psychiatric treatment was simply admission to the mental hospital; the mental hospital was the treatment. Although Henry Maudsley campaigned in the latter decades of the century for ambulant treatments and out-patient clinics, the professional pessimism of psychiatrists did not allow their development until just before the second world war.

Instead the treatment of mental disturbances was promoted more by neurologists than by psychiatrists. In the 1870s some French medical men began experimenting with the suspect techniques of hypnosis. This had always been shunned by the medical profession as the province of quacks. However, Jean-Martin Charcot, the most eminent neurologist in France and on a par with Hughlings Jackson in England, lent his prestige to a serious medical interest in hypnosis. He thought of the hypnotic trance as an experimental model of the degenerative processes he thought underlay mental disorders. However others in France, and a little later in Britain and particularly in the United States, began to be impressed by the suggestive element in hypnosis and its use as a therapeutic method. This was conducted, at first, on an out-patient basis, by neurologists on those patients they tended to see most. Those patients presented with bizarre abnormalities of neurological function but no damage to the nervous system. T