Picturing insanity: Narratives and photographs in the Lunatic Asylum in Bucharest, Eastern Europe, 1870
Prof. Octavian Buda
Thursday 4
th February
WF38 on the first
floor of the Medical School at 5.30pm
College of Medical and Dental Sciences
Institute of Applied Health Research
About 1839
the first specialized asylum for the insane, originally an Orthodox monastery
(the Marcutza Asylum, then near Bucharest, Romania) opened its doors to
individuals considered insane and beggars; they later appointed doctors tried
to turn this asylum from a place of isolation and detention into a modern
medical institution aimed at returning the cured insane individual back into
society. They made sustained efforts to improve the methods of occupational
therapy by organizing special workshops/workstations for the inpatients.
In 1870 the Romanian physician Nicholas G. Chernbach published a
photographic atlas of the main types of mental alienation, a collection of
twelve plates depicting mentally ill patients from the Marcutza Asylum in Bucharest.
Each photograph included a diagnosis based on the clinical nosography and
theories of the physiognomy of insanity acknowledged during the period. The
publication of the atlas--just a few years after Hugh W. Diamond's initial use
of photography for this purpose in Britain in the 1850s--means that the
photographs were not only the first taken in Romania, but among the first
photographs of the mentally ill in Europe. The same year, Chernbach published
in Bucharest another psychiatric study related to the Marcutza Asylum: ‘A
typical case of furious hysterical mania, treated by Conolly’s method’. The
article was a case report intended to demonstrate the application of
‘non-restraint’ method, praising John Conolly’s abolition of mechanical
restraint at the Hanwell Asylum in 1839, a decision which by 1850 had been
adopted in almost all asylums throughout England and later Europe.
This presentation provides an insight into the origins of modern clinical
psychiatry and medical advances in Romania, and to the contemporary
personalities in Romanian and Eastern European medicine.
ALL ARE WELCOME TO ATTEND
Details of future seminars are available from: Dr Vanessa Heggie, Institute
of Applied Health Research, College of Medical and Dental Sciences, University
of Birmingham, Birmingham B15 2TT.
