S&F_scienzaefilosofia.it (Jun 2015)
«EN DEHORS DES MURS». POUR UNE HISTOIRE RENOUVELÉE DES INSTITUTIONS DE LA FOLIE À L’ÉPOQUE CONTEMPORAINE
Abstract
Following the 1961 famous works by Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman (A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason and Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates), many historians have considered that the medicalization of insanity in the modern age had mostly led to a “great confinement” and a greater segregation of all individuals deemed mentally unfit during the “asylum era”. However, new research demonstrates that this classic narrative of the psychiatric past needs to be revised. It discloses that, ever since the 19th century, a whole other medical culture existed as a challenge to asylums, a culture that advocated the integration of the mad and fought to disassociate psychiatry from the dominant model of confinement all throughout the occidental world. This article aims at presenting the results of these historical works that depict another aspect of the psychiatric history, exploring “boarding out” practices, instead of asylum ones.
