This section of the blog serves as a collection-point for primary and secondary resources in the history of psychiatry. Our aim is that this collection will eventually include a wide variety of such resources — documents, court transcripts, photos and other visual records, on-line exhibits or image galleries — as well as bibliographies, syllabi, and other materials or links of interest to teachers, students, and independent researchers. The section will be up-dated on a regular basis and we therefore welcome new submissions or links.
Syllabi
- National Institute of Health Syllabus Archive for Mental Illness and the Mind: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/collections/digital/syllabi/subjectsall.html
- Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S): http://www.4sonline.org/resources/syllabi
- MIT Syllabus Archive for History of Science, Medicine and Technology: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Science–Technology–and-Society/index.htm
Bibliographies
- National Library of Medicine Resources on the History of Psychiatry: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/pdf/historypsychiatry.pdf
- Psychiatry and History: http://sites.google.com/site/psychiatryfootnotes/bibliography
- Bibliography of 1st-person narratives of mental illness: http://www.gailhornstein.com/files/Bibliography_of_First_Person_Narratives_of_Madness_5th_edition.pdf
- Mental Disease Moving Images Pre-1950 at the National Library of Medicine: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/pdf/mental.pdf
- Victorian Psychiatry: http://www.lesleyahall.net/victpsyc.htm
Case Histories
- Case histories relating to children and disability in the 19th century: http://chnm.gmu.edu/cyh/case-studies/110
- Psychiatry and History: http://sites.google.com/site/psychiatryfootnotes/case-histories-from-the-history-of-psychiatry
Treatments
- WWI American Neuropsychiatry: http://www.archive.org/details/WW1ArmyMedDeptHistV10
- Classic texts in the history of psychotherapy: http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/topic.htm#psychoanalysis
- On-line exhibit on hydrotherapy: http://www.cornellpsychiatry.org/history/osk_die_lib/hydrotherapy/default.htm
- The history of shock therapy: www.cerebromente.org.br/ n04/historia/shock_i.htm
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Literature of Prescription: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/literatureofprescription/
Eugenics
- Resources on the history of eugenics: www.h-net.org/~eugenics/
- Image Archive in the Eugenics Movement: http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/eugenics/
- Eugenics in California: http://www.csus.edu/cshpe/eugenics/index.html
Landmark Cases in Psychiatry and Law
Links to Organizations, Research Centers, and Sites of Interest
- Cornell History of Psychiatry: http://www.cornellpsychiatry.org/history/about/
- Archives of the History of American Psychology: http://www3.uakron.edu/ahap/http://www.uakron.edu/chp/archives/
- Somatosphere: http://www.somatosphere.net/
- National Library of Medicine: 19th Century Psychiatry: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/diseases/index.html
- Photo exhibit of abandoned asylums: http://www.abandonedasylum.com/
h-madness 
I am writing a musical that features a protagonist who has a single panic attack when asked to go out in a boat. She is otherwise a very competent, appropriate woman, age 28. She has had an irrational fear of the water since her young son drowned (probably exacerbated by the drowning of her father when she was young.) The story is set in 1908.
What would an intelligent but not formally educated person who loves her think about a panic attack at that time? What would be the medical term for it then? Would he/she have recognized it as an anxiety issue? Would he/she understand how to treat a patient who is hyperventilating?
Thanks for your help. Sandy Wolf
Hi – I’m keen to look at the bibliography of 1st person narratives at Mt Holyoke, listed above, but can’t access it with the link given. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Or suggestions of any other historic archive that has captured patients’ accounts, rather than practitioners’.
Thanks,
Fiona Shaw
Hi, I am a Psychiatrist and Faculty of the Psychiatry Department of the Faculty of Medicine, Universidad Andres Bello in Santiago, Chile.
I want to share my contact, congratulate you for this excelent webpage and tell that I do Pre and Post graduate teaching and I tell that I just can’t (sometimes against my colleagues opinions) do a class without an Historical note. How could anyone understand why Antipsychotics are classified the way they are without knowing that there was a “typical” clinical side effect not shown by the “atypical” molecules? Students feel so much relieved by knowing that this difference is not rooted in any “mega-complex” concept.
One of my all time favorite quotes is one by Klaus Konrad “Ideas that do not try to connect with concepts of the past usually have little chance of project themselves to the future” (super free translation)
Warm regards,
Dr. Luis Varela
Sadly, several of these links are dead ones.