Discipline and Superiority: Neurasthenia and Masculinity in the Hungarian Medical Discourse*

Gergely Magos

Eötvös Loránd University, Faculty of Social Sciences

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 14 Issue 4 (2025): 588-614 DOI 10.38145/2025.4.588

“The nerve is still a mystery, which is why neurasthenia is in vogue,” wrote Viktor Cholnoky, the renowned Hungarian writer in 1904.1 Indeed, neurasthenia, a mental disorder considered a typically male ailment, was at the forefront of medical discourses in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, yet so far, it has largely escaped the attention of Hungarian medical historians. Neurasthenia can be interpreted through multiple analytical frameworks, and connections can be drawn between neurasthenia and experiences of modernization, nationalism, and social inequalities; the emergence of the middle class and consumer society; and the professionalization of psychology, among other factors. This paper aims to explore how neurasthenia, as a male mental disorder, was discussed in the Hungarian medical discourse in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I argue that this medical concept contributed to the medicalization of male sexuality and also reinforced the existing social gender hierarchy. Male sexuality and male social roles are the focus of the paper, but I also briefly explore how anxieties over modernity and the perceived decline of the nation were linked to other male mental disorders, such as paralysis progressiva.

Keywords: neurasthenia, masculinity, male sexuality, medicalization

Masculinity and Neurasthenia

In a criminology article, police captain József Vogel described the case of a 26-year-old financial manager who became homosexual as a prisoner of war after World War I. Vogel claimed that prisoners with “weak nerves” often masturbated due to the lack of “normal sexual intercourse.” This behavior, he claimed, can induce neurasthenia. These men then would completely abandon “normal” sexual habits and turn to homosexuality.2

This case reminds us that sexuality has always been a subject of curiosity and, with the emergence of the modern sciences, also of scientific interest. As Michel Foucault suggested, society did not directly repress sexuality but rather made it a subject of knowledge. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the scientific discourse about sexuality served to control and regulate the body in the alleged cause of public health, productivity, and national progress.3 The pathologization of “abnormal” sexual behaviors, such as onanism or frigidity, established sexual norms for both women and men. Medical discourse incorporated female and male sexuality into biopolitical efforts, thereby establishing sexual norms necessary for fertility and “normal” marital sexuality.4

Medical concepts became an integral part of the discourses about humanity and its environment, which sought to capture social, political, and economic changes at the level of the body. Social pathologies were given a medical interpretation. The medical focus on the male body was closely connected to the emergence of modern notions of masculinity, which found expression in stereotypes reflecting social values and norms surrounding male body and psyche.5 Sexuality no longer exclusively served social reproduction, but, according to male bourgeois etiquette, it also had to satisfy the sexual needs of women. Male honor demanded that a husband be potent but also gentle within the confines of marriage.6 At the end of the nineteenth century, an alleged crisis of masculinity emerged as part of pervasive everyday experience. Women’s emancipation and the purported effeminization of men were considered the greatest threats to masculinity, along with the alleged crimes and forms of sexual deviance attributed to various minority groups, such as Jews. The perceived decline of masculinity was expressed in medical terms. Physical frailty or degenerated appearance were interpreted as symptoms of moral decay, sin, sexual aberrations, and, frequently, mental illness.7

Physicians identified sharp boundaries between purportedly normal sexuality and sexual deviance, which was seen as pathological. Yet the normalization of male and female sexuality took different forms, and their interpretation was based on gender essentialism. Male sexual over- or underperformance was referred to as onanism or impotence, and women were labeled as frigid or nymphomaniacal. These gendered interpretations of sexuality were explained with references to anatomical and biological differences, providing a “scientific” explanation of gender inequalities.8

The medicalization of male sexuality and especially masturbation is a well explored historical topic. In the eighteenth century, religious moral judgement of masturbation was replaced by scientific investigation.9 Nevertheless, masturbation continued to be regarded as the archetypal form of selfish, unproductive, deviant sexuality. The onanist was often accused of retreating into individualism and neglecting his role in national reproduction.10 A prevailing belief among physicians held that masturbation is harmful to health and potentially led to insanity.11

In the late nineteenth century, various medical diagnostic terms, including neurasthenia, were also closely associated with masculinity and male sexuality. The term neurasthenia was popularized by the American physician George M. Beard in the second half of the nineteenth century, and Beard’s influential work popularized the concept worldwide.12 The term, which is derived from Ancient Greek, literally means “weakness of the nerves.” The condition was viewed by medical experts as nervous exhaustion as a consequence of burdensome intellectual labor and overstimulation of the nervous system.13 It was closely associated with the emergence of modernization, as processes such as urbanization, industrialization, technological development, and the expansion of education, freedom and thus personal responsibility put additional stresses on the nervous system.14 According to Beard, in addition to the modern lifestyle and burdensome intellectual work, excessive sexuality or, in contrast, sexual continence or forced abstinence could cause neurasthenia.15

Beard felt that neurasthenia was a typically American ailment, and this, he believed, indicated the leading role of the American nation in the spread of modern civilization. The use of the term “Americanitis,” as neurasthenia was later labeled, was hardly a critique of modernity. Rather, it expressed a certain faith in the superiority of the American nation, which was allegedly marked by nervous sensitivity. These refined sensibilities, according to this theory, contributed to the rise of modern civilization, i.e., economic, technological, social, and political progress, and this in turn created further stimulation for the nervous system. This “vicious circle” made the American nation not only the custodian of modern civilization but, at the same time, paradoxically neurasthenic. Beard provided a medical legitimization for American exceptionalism, reinforcing the perceived hierarchy among nations.16 Moreover, neurasthenia served as an indicator of social inequalities within a society, since it was not equally widespread among different social strata. Its prevalence was closely linked to one’s proximity to modernity. Beard considered elite social groups, especially urban intellectual men, more susceptible to neurasthenia due to their deeper connection with modern civilization. In contrast, groups at the lower end of the social spectrum, such as “savage peoples” (African or Native Americans), the rural population, manual laborers, and women were perceived as less affected by the disease. Beard’s analysis could medically explain and validate the success of the social elite, suggesting that while Yankee businessmen and cultivated upper-class women benefited from modern progress, they bore a “high price” because of their susceptibility to neurasthenia.

Medical terms such as neurasthenia captured an understanding of the new modern male, a figure who was mentally stressed by the accelerated lifestyle and his obligations. This description of masculine identity was not limited to the United States. It soon gained international recognition, albeit in various forms. The adaptation of the term reflected local circumstances and was deeply intertwined with discourses about the nation.

In European discourses, neurasthenia expressed a fear of social decadence and the perceived decline and degeneration of nations and empires. In the British medical discourse, neurasthenia and other mental diseases thought to be more common among men were considered an important factor in the accelerating pace of national decadency.17 The disease came to be more frequently diagnosed in late nineteenth-century France in the context of growing concern about the decline of “true” manhood. Neurasthenia was regarded as an ailment caused by the cultural and moral weakness of men, exacerbated by urbanization and industrialization. This discourse intersected with national anxieties about France’s political and military power, suggesting that the “recovery” of masculinity, male emotional self-discipline, and physical strength could lead to the renewal of national vigor.18 In Spain, neurasthenia provided a medical description of “proper” masculinity, the decline of which was closely linked to the decline of the Spanish Empire. The medicalization of the decadent bourgeoisie male elite served to maintain their social status, while their vulnerability was presented as a main cause of the Spanish nation’s crisis.19 Concerns about masculine values and male sexual performance, intertwined with broader discourses about national strength and progress, appeared even in Russia, Japan, or Argentina.20

By the late nineteenth century, neurasthenia had also become a significant medical category in Central Europe. The German medical and broader discourse followed the international trends, and discussions of neurasthenia were intertwined with the perceived consequences of modernization. Between the 1880s and the 1910s, interpretations of the disease underwent a transformation. Physicians shifted from viewing nervousness as a mental stress to interpreting it as a sign of degeneration requiring biopolitical intervention.21 At the same time, neurasthenia became an integral part of the new bourgeois masculine identity, and diagnoses of neurasthenia were used to express everyday anxieties about sexual performance.22 In Austria-Hungary, the allegedly degenerative potentials of the ailment gained significance, and because of the Empire’s multiethnic composition, the disease was often employed to provide a medical explanation of ethnic differences and reinforce, under the guise of science, a “civilizational hierarchy” among nations. Neurasthenia was frequently presented as a disease of the Austrian-German bourgeois elite, while “Slavic” or “Eastern” nations were seen “too primitive” for neurosis.23 In order to arrive at a nuanced grasp of the Hungarian discourse, it is crucial to know the German and Austrian scientific contexts, as the concept of neurasthenia reached Hungary through the scientific literature in German.24

These analyses suggest that neurasthenia transcended mere medical description and became a crucial term through which social anxieties about masculinity and national identity were expressed. My objective in the discussion below is to present the medicalization of male sexuality in Hungary. To explore this, I analyze the discourse among the Hungarian physicians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I argue that while neurasthenia was part of the biopolitical discourse, it also served to provide discursive reinforcement of male social roles and, thus, social inequalities. The Hungarian medical discourse followed the international scientific arguments, reflecting a growing fear of degeneration and national decline. Perceived male sexual dysfunctions, namely excessive masturbation or impotence, were integral parts of the diagnosis. However, in Hungary, anxiety about national decline was expressed with a different diagnosis, namely a diagnosis of paralysis progressiva. As Michael S. Kimmel has suggested, the perceived crisis of masculinity often emerged when gender relations were under intensive transformation, and this notion of crisis was a tool that served to maintain the existing social hierarchy.25 The emerging bourgeois male identity, expressed in medical categories such as neurasthenia, was closely associated with modernity, intellectual capacity, and civilization. This stereotype of masculinity stood in sharp contrast with femininity, which was characterized as emotional, instinctive, and suggestible.

Medical and Organic Explanations in Hungarian Medical Discourse

Beard’s influential concept of neurasthenia reached the Hungarian medical com­munity quickly through German translations. In 1881, Hungarian medical journals reviewed the German translation of Beard’s work on neurasthenia, which was originally published in 1880.26 The term was rapidly adopted, as shown by the fact that the 1883 Magyar Lexikon (Hungarian Lexicon) dedicated a separate article to neurasthenia, which was translated as “nervous weakness.”27

Hungarian physicians identified heredity as a significant factor in the development of the disease, establishing a relative consensus that neurasthenia is a pathological condition stimulated by external conditions. Jakab Salgó, a physician in the Royal National Asylum at Lipótmező in Budapest, the central asylum of Hungary, criticized those who described “nervousness” as a pandemic, suggesting that such views led to harsh criticism of “our familiar social institutions.” He contended that “nervousness is a disease, a pathological life process,” the prevalence of which is partly due to doctors’ better recognition of the disease.28

University professor Jenő Kollarits offered an organic explanation rooted in a different conceptual framework. He contended that nervousness is not a “disease” in the conventional sense, since this term covers externally acquired disorders. He claimed that nervousness is an inherited trait: “The character is made up of the chemical and physical features of the nervous system, which react according to the structure inherited from our ancestors. And the reaction is triggered by external circumstances and can be developed to a certain level, e.g. by education, but only within the individual’s capacity.”29 He called the deviation of the nervous system “heredoanomaly,” which could manifest as degeneration (heredodegeneration) or, in some cases, even amelioration or genius (heredoamelioratio). Therefore, both madness and genius were considered hereditary neurological conditions, while nervousness, including hysteria and neurasthenia, was interpreted as an inherited neurological predisposition.30

Fear of social degeneration also led to the emergence of eugenic discourses among physicians. University professor and forensic psychiatrist Ernő Mo­rav­csik stated that between 60 and 70 percent of neurasthenic patients suffered from their condition because of hereditary reasons. According to him, the “pathological disposition” is also reflected in the degenerated physical appearance of the face and the deformity of the body, yet he claimed that this “degenerative condition […] could be ameliorated and eliminated over time through consistent interbreeding with healthier ones.”31 Ernő Jendrassik, a prominent neurologist and also a professor at University of Budapest and the director of Internal Medicine at the Budapest Hospital of the Brothers of Mercy, linked degeneration to various social pathologies or cults,

such as vegetarians, who without any rational reason live exclusively on plant food, and furthermore, they consume eggs and milk as plant food. Similar to them are the anti-alcoholics who were not alcoholics and who want to reform their fellowmen, but who are looking for victims not at the kiosks where spirits are sold, but among those who drink moderately.

Similar also are those who seek to reform humanity, and among them there are many who play a great role in the world, precisely because of these neurasthenic peculiarities or exceptional abilities.32

The ideas of the psychoanalytic school also bore strong affinities with this medical approach or organic explanation. Freud took an early interest in Beard’s theory and the concept of neurasthenia, as both of them attached great importance to sexuality in the genesis of the disease.33 According to Freud, “psychoneuroses,” including hysteria, phobia, or obsessional neurosis, were rooted in early psychosexual development. He distinguished the former category from “actual neuroses,” such as anxiety neurosis and neurasthenia. This latter term referred to the somatically induced distortion of sexual behavior, namely “onanism” and “coitus interruptus.”34 Freud argued that these “abnormal” sexual practices lead to self-intoxication, which weakens male sexual vigor. Meanwhile, he rejected the idea that the primary connection between masturbation and mental illness is psychological, a notion rooted in feelings of guilt or fear of social stigma.35 Sándor Ferenczi, Freud’s Hungarian friend and associate, agreed that neurasthenia is a “disease whose material carrier is undoubtedly some pathological alteration in the tissues of the nervous system.”36 Ferenczi explained neurasthenia as a consequence of autotoxicity (or self-intoxication) caused by excessive strain.37 According to him, the potential causes could be defecation issues, “self-poisoning with abnormal metabolites,”38 or the misdirected fulfilment or wasting of libido on an “inappropriate object.”39 He emphasized “excessive onanism,” which often occurs discreetly, such as when a patient fumbles with something in his pockets.40 In the conclusion to his essay, Ferenczi claimed that masturbation (and neurasthenia) manifests in symptoms such as diminished sexual potency and premature ejaculation. Ferenczi argued that, unlike in the case of hysteria, effective treatment for neurasthenia is the restoration of a “normal sexual life.”41

Thus, the Hungarian medical discourse on neurasthenia showed a broad consensus on two key points. First, it was generally accepted that the condition is rooted in somatic or pathological factors, with an inherited neurological predisposition often interpreted as degeneration. Some physicians directly linked bodily degeneration to social pathologies or decadence. Second, there was a shared conviction that external factors, such as sexual stimuli, trigger this disease, indicating that the nervous system is stressed beyond its inherent capacity.

Neurasthenia as a Male Disease

Hungarian physicians did not interpret neurasthenia as a male disease. Further­more, the distinction between various forms of nervous disorders, such as hysteria, neurasthenia, or hypochondria, was viewed with skepticism.42 At the same time, however, it was also clear for some of them that in medical practice, there was a meaningful difference between hysteria and neurasthenia. Károly Laufenauer, the leader of the Department of Neurology and Psychiatry at the Budapest University, provided a thoughtful self-analysis of diagnostic practices and the social stereotypes reflected in the diagnoses of hysteria and neurasthenia. He defended women against the frequent and unjust accusation that they were the people primarily afflicted with nervousness:

I must rise to the defense of women who are so often and so unfairly attacked, as if the circle of women would establish the house and ground of nervousness. This is not the case, nervousness among women is no more common compared to men, and it is true that when we speak about very few hysterical men and many more hysterical women, we ignore the fact that we know of very few neurasthenic women and many more neurasthenic men. However, I have been convinced for many years, and no one will ever dissuade me, and I hope that this view will gain acceptance, that there is no difference between hysteria and neurasthenia; they are siblings, or even more than that, because these two names mean exactly the same thing and refer to the same disease.

For this reason, and perhaps because of opportunism, since to say someone is hysterical today is almost an insult, the term neurasthenia is more appropriate for women’s nervousness, thus, in a few years, we will see the dishonoring term hysteria disappear from the nomenclature of diseases to make way for the rightly and correctly applied name of neurasthenia for both sexes.43

Statistical evidence confirms Laufenauer’s contention that, contrary to wide­spread social belief, insanity was not a typically female condition. In Hungarian national asylums, men outnumbered women dramatically. Between 1899 and 1902, the ratio stood at 651 women for every 1,000 men in the asylums. Although this ratio shifted somewhat after World War I, a significant disparity remained. In 1918–1919, there were 724 women for every 1,000 male patients in state-owned national asylums.44 The population census reinforces this pattern from a different perspective, underscoring that, relative to Western and Northern European nations (such as Germany, the United Kingdom, and the Scandinavian and Baltic states), the preponderance of men in institutions for the mentally ill in Hungary was remarkable.45

Laufenauer’s reflections on the prejudices behind the disease categories are noteworthy, especially his views concerning the offensive nature of the term hysteria. The statistics reveal that, in clinical practice, women were predominantly diagnosed with hysteria, while men were more frequently labeled neurasthenic. Before World War I, the gender imbalance was striking. Among women, there were 17 times more patients diagnosed with hysteria, whereas men were represented 17 times more among neurasthenics. However, these diagnoses were relatively rare in asylums, with only 1.6–1.7 percent of patients diagnosed with hysteria and fewer than 1 percent with neurasthenia in the national asylums.46 The comparative rarity of these diagnoses may derive from the perception that such conditions were not particularly severe or threatening to individuals or society. Under the law, only those deemed dangerous were committed to asylums. Interestingly, in the 1920s, gender discrimination in these categories declined sharply, though it did not disappear.47

It is also worth noting that Jews were heavily overrepresented among the mentally ill in asylums. Before World War I, Jews comprised about 5 percent of Hungary’s population, yet the constituted 15 percent of those diagnosed as mentally ill and 30 percent of those diagnosed as neurasthenics. In other words, almost one in three individuals diagnosed with neurasthenia was Jewish.48 For a more complex analysis, it would be interesting to see how the diagnosis of neurasthenia varied across different socio-professional groups, although data on this subject is scarce. However, the striking overrepresentation of Jews is revealing, as they were a highly educated group with a strong urban background, perceived as successful in economic and intellectual endeavors. Thus, based on these data, the cautious conclusion can be drawn that neurasthenia was applied as a descriptive framework of the social elite both in discourse and in medical practice.

Male Sexuality

Most physicians associated both neurasthenia and hysteria with sexuality. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, physicians increasingly linked both conditions to sexual behavior, focusing on masturbation as a central theme in their explanations of mental illnesses. The morally loaded term “onanism” was transformed from a religious concern into a medical issue that was allegedly connected to various forms of abnormality and insanity.49 The somatization of masturbation was used to explain the practice, which was thought of as a form of male “madness,” a clear reflection of the attitudes of the era toward sexuality.50

For men, there were two primary forms of allegedly “abnormal” sexuality: the decline of sexual vigor and the improper indulgence of the libido. The former referred to conditions such as impotence and premature ejaculation, while the latter included behaviors such as masturbation, promiscuity, and sex with prostitutes. This description of madness served to emphasize a socially approved framework of male sexuality characterized as heterosexual, vigorous, and monogamous.

Jakab Salgó identified adolescence and sexual maturation as a critical turning point when nervous symptoms often emerged.51 During this transition period, intensified sexual stimuli and desires could lead to excessive sexual needs, causing symptoms of neurasthenia, such as masturbation and exhibitionism. Flirtatious girls kissed boys and used clothing and jewelry to adorn themselves, while boys were allegedly prone to committing perverted sexual acts. Salgó contended that asexual behavior and a lack of libido were also abnormal and should also be understood as signs of neurotic disease. The interplay between strong sexual desires and neurotic sensitivity could lead to complex emotional states, including bitterness, world-weariness, and suicidal ideation. Salgó’s notions combined medical analysis with moral condemnation, implying that deviations from expected sexual behavior were often tied to broader violations of moral standards, including behaviors such as lying, adopting a vagabond lifestyle, and stubborn and selfish conduct, which, Salgó contended, contributed to the transgression of legal and moral rules.

Kornél Preisich, a famous private pediatrician, offered advice for parents who sought to prevent onanism among children.52 He encouraged them to make it impossible for the children to move, which essentially meant tying them up. He also proposed that children should not be left alone before bedtime, and they should not be given blankets or, if they were given a blanket, then they should be required to keep their hands above it. This strict moral judgment surrounding “self-pollution” permeated society, revealing the widespread conviction that it was necessary to regulate sexuality. Other specialists and professionals, in addition to physicians, were involved in this practice of social control.53 Innovations emerged within educational circles to create garments specifically designed to prevent masturbation, such as the anti-onanism shirt patented by Hungarian teacher Bernát Gáspár in 1914.

In the contemporary medical discourse, masturbation, which came to be regarded as the most obvious sign of neurasthenia, was mostly associated with young men, if, however, not regarded as an exclusively “male” sin. The use of the term onanism, a pejorative synonym for masturbation, implied that women were excluded from this issue, since they were incapable of committing the “sin of Onan.”54 Onanism almost exclusively referred to male masturbation in the contemporary medical discourse.

Figure 1. A specifically designed shirt for preventing onanism. Magyar Királyi Szabadalmi Hivatal,
63774. lajstromszámú szabadalom (1900) [Royal Hungarian Patent Office, patent no. 63774].
https://library.hungaricana.hu/hu/view/SZTNH_SzabadalmiLeirasok_063774 Accessed September 2, 2025

Sexual neurasthenia,55 another term introduced by Beard, referred to a con­dition specific to men and occurring in midlife. It was characterized by a lack of sexual vigor, impotence, and an in­ability to have fulfilling and satisfying sexual intercourse. Miksa Weinberger, a Hungarian balneologist, claimed that approximately 30 percent of the cases of neurasthenia were linked to sexual issues, and he categorized male sexual difficulties as a subset of neurasthenia when somatic causes were absent.56 He identified two subtypes. The first was the “pathological waste of semen,” which meant promiscuous and licentious behavior and masturbation. The distinctive syndromes were called “pollutio” and “spermatorrhoea.” Wein­berger emphasized the physiological aspect of this behavior, i.e., the remorse and guilt felt by the onanist after he has committed his “sin.” But at the same time, Weinberger also emphasized that his intention was not “to deny the harmful consequences of onanism,” which causes “fatigue and hypersensitivity of the nervous system in the brain, as well as the spinal cord.”57 The second subtype, called “impotentia coeundi,” referred to sexual underperformance, including the lack of libido, erectile dysfunction, and premature ejaculation. Weinberger argued that the psychological cause of this disease is performance expectations and the fear of failure. As one of his patients complained, “when he began his honeymoon, he was frightened that he might not be able to perform coitus, and this thought dominated him so much that he did not even get an erection in response to the sensual excitement he was seeking.”58

Károly Hudovernig, the head of the Psychiatric Department at Szent János Hospital, highlighted the vulnerability of middle-aged, unmarried men, who decided to settle down and get married. Such men have doubts concerning their sexual performance, and they fear that they might not be able to satisfy their wives’ sexual needs. Symptoms such as masturbation, sexual abstinence, excessive sexuality, and involuntary “pollution” (ejaculation, nocturnal emission) were common. Hudovernig noted that many of his patients blamed their condition on their earlier sex lives, which had included careless affairs, which had ultimately led to “the decline of male vigor.”59 These men

were not the enemies of an active sex life, but saw it simply as a series of accidental and vagabond episodes; their whole life had passed without any serious affection or more or less permanent liaison, and their sexual lives had consisted only of sporadic coitus each time with a different medium, for certain individuals more frequently than for others, therefore they sought and found the objects of their sexual satisfaction among the public or private loose women60 at all times, and because of their age and the trends in sexual pleasures, they often sought the exciting and perverse manipulations of these professional sex objects. […] they regarded the accidental female partner only as a natural and public canal for sexual arousal and needs.61

Hudovernig considered male promiscuity and a restrained sex life (asexuality or the loss of libido) medical issues. However, he rejected Freudian theory, which explains everything in terms of sexuality. However, he completely agreed with the notion that there was no reason to seek any somatic cause of neurasthenia. Neurasthenia, he believed, was a psychological issue caused by anxiety and fear surrounding sexual performance. The doctor’s job was thus to “relieve the psyche from the incubus.”62

Although Weinberger and Hudovernig were also heavily involved in the medicalization of male sexuality, their more sophisticated approach took into consideration the psychological and social aspects of sexuality. A notable aspect of this medical discourse is that many Hungarian physicians, familiar with the Freudian theory, sought to combine somatic therapies with psychoanalysis. However, the application of psychoanalysis met an ambivalent response. Many practitioners dismissed it, regarding it as a reductionist explanation that linked mental illness solely to psycho-sexual development. Weinberger argued that treatments such as balneotherapy (a therapeutic practice that uses bathing in mineral-rich waters, thermal springs, mud, or gases as a form of health treatment) would be ineffective if psychoanalytical methods were not also incorporated. He encouraged physicians to study patients’ “background, lifestyle, family circumstances, and potential occupational problems.”63 One of his contemporaries, urologist Mór Porosz, who worked at the Department of Dermatology and Venereology at the University of Budapest, employed faradization (electric stimulation) of the prostate as a somatic treatment, but he also believed that neurasthenia was caused by guilt often felt by men after certain sexual activities, such as masturbation or failures in sexual performance.64 Porosz cited one of his patients, who expressed deep shame after masturbation: “I felt disgusted with myself for my miserable, uncontrollable passion. […] When I was alone, I reproached myself loudly. […] I became a big misanthrope, and misogynist.”65 Porosz argued that while masturbation did not generate pathological changes, it created a disturbance in mood driven by guilt. Despite this psychological explanation, Porosz was convinced that the faradization of the prostate could be the best treatment to solve the core problem, namely excessive libido.66 In this case, the guilt felt by the patient may have been in response to his fear of judgement and social stigma. Masturbation was considered a “disgusting activity” by society, and these kinds of widespread social norms may well have caused the patient’s sense of frustration and shame.

Some physicians argued that neurasthenia could turn a heterosexual into a homosexual or could find expression in other “abnormal” sexual practices. “Life produces many indescribable variations,” one of them wrote.67 Sexual “aberrations” such as homosexuality, fetishism, and masochism were connected to neurasthenia.68

The medical discourse on neurasthenia reveals that male sexuality was subjected to a scrutiny similar to the scrutiny to which female sexuality was subjected in the discourse on hysteria. Any deviation from medically defined “normal” male sexual performance was deemed pathological, regardless of whether the underlying cause was classified as physical or psychological. The latter interpretation often labelled socially nonconformist behaviors and emotional tensions as pathological. Tensions surrounding sexual underperformance were frequently dismissed as unfounded anxiety or phobia, revealing the pervasive medicalization of male sexuality. The aforementioned Ernő Jendrassik noted the interesting case of a 17-year-old boy, who was sent to different doctors to cure his “pollution” (nocturnal emission):

Three years ago (he was only 14 years old!), the patient was sent “pro coitu” [to have sexual intercourse]69 by his family members. The serious young man did not like this encouragement, nor did he masturbate. With all this in mind, I asked the boy what unpleasant consequences he feels because of pollution. To which he replied in total denial, and at the same time he added, that “both the doctor and the specialist were surprised that I didn’t have any problem. They said, I should have.” Isn’t this the most obvious neurasthenic upbringing?70

Jendrassik’s question, which is phrased in the form of a rebuke, reveals that he blamed the other doctors because of the approach they took to the treatment of harmless “pollution.”

These contemporary studies illustrate how medical discourse maintains social differences and inequalities between genders. The discourse about neuras­thenic men underscores a double standard, often referred to as Freud’s “double sexual morality,” which imposed severe social restrictions on female sexuality.71 The imperative of preserving female virginity shows this moral disparity. Promiscuous women and especially prostitutes were objectified and stigmatized as the “disgusting and infectious canal” of male sexual needs.72 Social expectations or obligations diverged for men who, if resorting to prostitution or masturbation, faced social condemnation and the consequent burden of guilt. As the sources clearly show, this dual morality gave men the latitude to lead a promiscuous sex life while also imposing on them a social obligation to identify themselves with “normal” masculinity and embody a masculine identity. Men who failed to meet these expectations were often labeled insane or neurasthenic.

Neurasthenia and Male Roles in Society

The term neurasthenia was closely linked not solely to male sexuality but also to the social roles assigned to men, and this understanding of the ailment reflected the values, norms, expectations, and stereotypes that were associated with masculinity. The differences between the ways in which neurasthenia was understood and diagnosed and the ways in which hysteria was diagnosed offer insights into the ways in which the medical discourse of the time reinforced social differences between men and women. In 1926, Ferenc Völgyesi, a renowned physician and hypnotizer,73 explained his view of the distinction between the “neurasthenic male psyche” and the “hysterical female psyche” in a widely read advisory book:

The hysterical type is definitely closer to primordial nature. She is quick-witted, instinctive in all her actions. Her spiritual life is overwhelmingly emotional. For her, logic, common sense, reason, truth, rationality are unknown and non-existent concepts, and to confront her with them is clearly unreasonable. […] she is receptive and reproductive, which means that she is passive, less autonomous and not made for productivity, for creating new things and not for organizing. […] In contrast, the fact is that the neurasthenic, more masculine spiritual type does not think with his “heart” as she does, but “always with his head.” […] The hysterical one can swim in happiness, carouse, have fun and enjoy the pleasures in life, while the neurasthenic one, being a light sleeper who lies awake all night compared to the former, goes to bed at night not sleeping the sleep of the just, but full of worries about what tomorrow will bring (the hysterical one simply doesn’t care). […] The hysterical one can be and therefore must be governed, not by logical arguments, but by hetero-suggestion, by the imperative and uncontroversial “declarations” of others, sometimes by reasonable force. It goes without saying that this is also dominant in the case of hysterical children, and this distinction is even more important in

parenting than in adult governance. In contrast, the neurasthenic one doesn’t respect any dogma or authority. […] The neurasthenic one only really believes what he feels and is convinced of as a logical truth, but he believes it fanatically and to the end.74

Völgyesi’s summary clearly reveals both the contemporary cultural stereo­types attached to men and women and also the power imbalance between men, women, and children. He describes women as emotional, instinctive, reproductive, careless, a bit naive and simple, like children, who can be easily manipulated or hypnotized and who thus need to be governed by men, who are rational, intellectual, independent, productive, and determined and therefore hold responsibility for the whole family. This paternalistic view suggests that male nervousness, captured in the concept of neurasthenia, is linked to the social expectation placed on men as breadwinners.

The aforementioned Károly Laufenauer offered another revealing insight into gender roles, arguing that neurasthenia is linked to men’s family life and work. His description affirms the patriarchal structure of family:

The most common cause of this nervousness [evolving in married life] is excessive intellectual work, effort without rest, as we say, a very rampant eagerness. It cannot be denied that the married status drives men to work more than the unmarried status. There is a psychological reason behind this; the person who starts a family lives not only for the present but also for the future, thinking of his children, of the possible reduction of his own workforce, and this constantly pushes him to acquire wealth to ensure the existence of his family. Therefore, the first and main concern of every careful wife should be that the head of the family not overwork himself and follow a suitable work schedule.75

Salgó was convinced that every illness has a somatic cause. He also agreed, however, that “intense, exhausting and devouring, physical and intellectual work” put a strain on the nervous system, which could lead to nervousness, especially in individuals whose nervous systems are “less developed.”76 Since this midlife nervousness, which often culminated in a mental crisis, was often connected with everyday struggles, its root was different. For men, burdensome work and the struggle to play the role of the breadwinner contributed to the disease, while for women, the exhausting experiences of childbirth and parenting played an important role. Interestingly, Salgó emphasized that it was not physical labor that exhausted men. Rather, it was the demands of intellectual work that could be debilitating.77 In his book A szellemi élet hygiénája (The Hygiene of Mental Life), he argued that paralysis progressiva78 (another disorder considered to affect primarily men at the time) was closely connected with intellectual activities such as education or office work, which could overstimulate the brain.79 Salgó noted that the people who were most frequently diagnosed with paralysis were members of social groups who had to face overwork (surmenage) alongside family issues, or in other words, married male intellectuals and office workers between 35 and 40 years of age. Men’s social and family duties as breadwinners protected women from the strains of everyday struggles, according to Salgó: “Marriage takes a burden off the woman’s shoulders, and this finds expression in the small number of [cases of] paralyses [among women].”80 Salgó cynically added that the social transformation of the time, namely female emancipation, had caused an increase in the number of women diagnosed with paralysis. This fact, he claimed, “may add a few drops of bitterness to the goblet of feminism’s successes.”81 He remarked that the feminist movement and revolution had had casualties: “No wonder that this sharp and ruthless war, into which women have entered with more zeal and enthusiasm than preparation and practice, affects women with its worse consequences. No great social transformation can be achieved without victims.”82

As Salgó’s argument exemplifies, like the medicalization of femininity, the creation of exclusive medical categories such as neurasthenia and paralysis, with which women were rarely diagnosed, also served to maintain gender inequalities. These gender differences were also reflected in social values. The medical concepts were adopted (and possibly created) presumably in part because they offered medical explanations for differing social roles and obligations. Jakab Fischer, a physician in Bratislava, cited an illuminating case. One of his female patients complained about her husband, who had been diagnosed by Fischer with neurasthenia. The wife reported that her husband “avoids companionship, cares little for his family, his clothes are sloppy, and he is more wasteful than before […] He cannot do his work, not only because he tires very quickly, but because he already shows the symptoms of memory lapses. His memory is worsening.”83 As her description makes clear, a normal, healthy man was sociable, hardworking, thrifty, and elegant, or at least took care to dress appropriately.

Physicians of the time claimed that men played a leading role in developing civilization, albeit at a considerable cost to their mental wellbeing. Ernő Moravcsik went back to the Beardian concept, claiming that

it puts an increased strain on the brain, when the rapid development and progress of all fields of science, art, literature, industry, and commerce requires the acquisition of a wider and more intensive knowledge, it shows various ways of acquiring wealth, material wellbeing and pleasure, it aggravates the struggle for existence together with the growing demands, it stimulates increased physical and mental activity, and it brings a series of material and mental crises and convulsions during changing circumstances.84

At that point, the global progress of civilization acquired a localized shape in the medical discourse, tying it to the struggles of the Hungarian nation. Unlike empires such as the United Kingdom, the United States, or Spain, the decline of Hungary was framed not within the context of imperialism but rather as a matter of relative backwardness. According to medical analyses, the general progress of civilization and development in Western countries led to “growing demand and aspirations” in Hungary, thereby placing additional pressures on people to “chase wealth.”85 However the gap between desires and economic conditions was too large, and thus only individuals who invested additional intellectual and physical efforts were able to satisfy their needs. Physicians stated that this relentless pursuit often culminated in mental health issues, namely paralysis. This disease, which was seen as affecting only male patients, was conceptualized as the “Hungarian insanity.”86 István Hollós, a physician in the Royal National Asylum at Lipótmező who became later a famous psychoanalyst, found that, while in Western Europe a mere 10 percent of those who had been diagnosed as mentally ill suffered from paralysis, in Hungary, this figure reached nearly 30 percent. Hollós blamed the snobbery of the Hungarian middle classes, coupled with their ambition to appear better than they actually were.87 Salgó provided a similar social explanation for this phenomenon, claiming that the Hungarian nation had embraced the same needs and desires as its more advanced Western counterparts. Yet, due to historical reasons, Hungarian society struggled to accumulate the sufficient capital to fulfill these aspirations:

We possess all the advancements and comforts that the development of science and taste has brought to humanity, and all the mental and physical pleasures that only the most sophisticated culture could have developed. Our soul and body are not only capable of the finest pleasures, but also desire them. However, we are not strong enough to obtain them, to satisfy our sophisticated desires. […] The wide gap between our aspirations and our strength is the reason why we stimulate our strength too hard, thus presenting ourselves as gentlemen.88

Physicians highlighted their responsibility to recover the “most important” figure of the workforce, the educated man. Their task was not merely to help the suffering patients, but also to reinvigorate them and facilitate their reintegration into society. Salgó argued that

nervous exhaustion is more than a mere medical issue; it has evolved into a social issue. […] It is clear that the well-understood interests of society require that adequate provisions be made for low-income or penniless nervous patients. This is not dictated by the much clichéd slogan of humanity, but by public interest. […] The poorer we are in material goods, the stronger should be the conviction that the true and inalienable wealth of any nation is the human being and his capacity for work. The money we spend on them is money saved.89

In support of this biopolitical approach, Fischer emphasized the substantial value of human capital. He argued that “the state’s most valuable wealth lies in its human resources. This is not only a humanistic but also an economic thesis. Furthermore, as health is the most valuable for the people, it follows that the most important interest of the state is to improve, develop, and preserve the health of its citizens. Consequently, the state’s most important objective must be healthcare.”90

Conclusion

The medical discourse on neurasthenia seems controversial. Historically, it was linked to male vigor and performance, both sexually and occupationally. Male sexuality was strictly disciplined, and any deviation from “normal” sexuality or behavior, such as masturbation, premature ejaculation, promiscuity, asexuality, impotence, or homosexuality, was categorized as an aberration or anomaly. These deviations were often described as pathological conditions requiring somatic treatment. In several cases, the hereditary predisposition of the nervous system was cited as the underlying cause of an abnormal sexual libido, which could lead to behaviors deemed undesirable, such as masturbation. However, a closer examination of the descriptions offered in specific medical cases reveals that the anxiety experienced by many young patients derived from fear of social stigma. Numerous cases illustrate that these individuals did not perceive themselves as ill. Rather, their sexuality was labeled as abnormal by their families or by the medical authorities. While psychological explanations spread among physicians, the pathological explanation remained predominant.

A similar argument can be seen in the case of men’s work. Any deviation from the expected performance was viewed as a medical issue. Men who were industrious or exceptionally accomplished were labelled potential victims of neurasthenia. It is worth noting that this aspect of the discourse served to reinforce existing social hierarchies, inequalities, and power dynamics at the discursive level. Neurasthenia came to be seen as a sign of superiority, industriousness, modernity, geniality, and intellectual potential, qualities which stood in sharp contrast with the nature of female hysteria. Women were often described as emotional, instinctive, suggestive, and needing to be governed by men. In this context, the significance of men’s work was highlighted in the medical texts. According to the contemporary medical discourse, the work performed by men not only maintained the family financially but also put additional strains on men’s nervous systems.

This description is loaded with moral implications. It clearly suggests that jobs requiring intellectual engagement, such as teaching, art, law, and public office, are the most dangerous for men’s health. The responsibilities associated with these professions extended beyond mere economic subsistence. They were understood as contributions to humanity as a whole. Thus, the medical discourse on neurasthenia reveals not only how this condition was understood as a consequence of individual struggles but also how it was used to buttress broader social values and power structures, ultimately shaping the understanding of masculinity in the given historical context.

* Supported by the EKÖP-24 University Excellence Scholarship Program of the Ministry for Culture and Innovation from the National Research, Development and Innovation Fund.

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On Mad Dogs and Their Relation to Human Medicine: The Discourse on Canines in Nineteenth-Century Medical Studies in Porto

Monique Palma

Universidade Aberta Portugal; Interuniversity Center for the History of Science and Technology
(CIUHCT), Nova University of Lisbon

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 14 Issue 4 (2025): 563-587 DOI 10.38145/2025.4.563

This study offers a discussion of the presence of non-human animals, specifically dogs, in the studies of Porto doctors in the nineteenth century. It emphasizes the relationship between humans and dogs in the context of rabies contamination, using inaugural dissertations presented to the Porto Medical and Surgical School as primary sources. This work offers a contribution to an emerging historical overview of the “One Health” movement, which was established in the twentieth century but has roots in earlier periods. The paper argues that there were other elements in the fight against rabies, a zoonosis that troubled Portuguese society in the period covered by this article and required a multiplicity of actions by human medicine, veterinary medicine, the population, and political authorities to manage effective solutions to combat the disease. It offers an illustrative example of how the organization of human society is not shaped solely by humans, as the analysis of the relevant historical sources reveals the prominent, if indirect, role of other non-human animals in shaping social structures. The theoretical and methodological framework of this work is grounded in the history of science and environmental history.

Keywords: history of science; history of medicine; environmental history; non-human; animals and human medicine; medical knowledge

Things go even further: reason is completely lost; sometimes it’s a sweet, sad, melancholic madness; sometimes there are passing fits of incoherence; persecution mania, and there are patients who can’t resist suicide; finally, the disturbances can be less severe and there is nothing but extravagance of ideas and language; in women, hysterical madness is frequent.1

This is a medical description of rabies symptoms from the end of the nineteenth century in the city of Porto, Portugal. The disease, sometimes confused with episodes of madness, terrified Portuguese society, endangered the population, and triggered a strong mobilization among human and non-human animals for its effective control.

This study examines the role of dogs as one of the primary vectors in the transmission of rabies to humans2 and also the uses to which dogs were put in the development of prophylactic measures against the rabies virus in Portugal, with particular emphasis on the city of Porto in the nineteenth century, a period marked by the consolidation of changes initiated in the previous century.3 Even today, we remain aware that the primary mode of rabies transmission to humans is through the bite of an infected dog.4

The transmission of rabies occurs through interspecies interaction. In the Portuguese context of the nineteenth century,5 political authorities relied on the support of a society immersed in a landscape of transformations within the medical field. During this period, medicine, religion, and methods of treating illness increasingly diverged, driven by a series of technological innovations that laid the foundation for clinical medicine.6

At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Carlos Alberto Salgado de Andrade defended and presented at Escola Médico-Cirúrgica do Porto his inaugural dissertation, entitled “Ligeira Contribuição para o Estudo da Raiva” (A small contribution to the study of Rabies in Portugal).7 He argued that “rabies is an infectious-contagious disease,8 originating in the dog, and transmitted by infection to all warm-blooded animals.”9 According to the newly graduated physician, since it was a disease originating (or at least thought to originate) in the dog, “in order better to understand the danger wherever it may exist and to avoid it as much as possible, we will study rabies in humans and in dogs, successively.”10

At this point, it is important to note that this article is not a study in human medicine aimed solely at the human species. I aim to contribute to the perspective that supports the “One Health” initiative. Sarah J. Pitt and Alan Gunn state in the paper One Health Concept (2024)11 that this framework constitutes a comprehensive approach to the study and management of infectious diseases, recognizing the intricate interdependence among humans, animals, plants, and the environment. Where does this concept originate? Pitt and Gunn demonstrate that in the mid-twentieth century, the American veterinary scientist Calvin Schwabe (1927–2006) first analyzed the parallels between human and animal health and welfare, introducing the concept of “One Medicine.” He underscored the importance of an integrated and multidisciplinary perspective from which veterinary professionals could contribute to the broader field of medicine. Epidemics among animals, known as epizootics, can also have an impact on humans.12

Schwabe further emphasized the relevance of incorporating the social sciences and developing effective communication strategies to foster community engagement in efforts to prevent and control infectious diseases. In the early twenty-first century, this concept evolved to encompass the health of entire ecosystems, including plants, wildlife, and geographic regions. The publication of the Manhattan Principles on Conservation in 2004 advocated for a holistic understanding of the dynamic interactions between humans and animals. The global outbreak of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV-1) from 2002 to 2004 further demonstrated the significant risks that zoonotic diseases pose to human populations. It was around this period that the term “One Health” was formally introduced, marking the consolidation of a unified vision for addressing human, animal, and environmental health within an integrated framework.13

This understanding of human health as interconnected with the health of the environment and other animals predates the formal establishment of the concept.14 The case of Carlos Alberto Salgado de Andrade mentioned in the paragraph above offers a clear illustration of this. The relationship between humans and other animals has changed significantly in recent years, yet the interaction itself, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of such coexistence, is not new in history. Especially in the context of zoonoses, although Andrade has argued that “this subject belongs more to Veterinary Medicine than to Human Medicine, I have no doubt, nevertheless, in presenting here some considerations that may help us understand rabies in this animal, which is almost always the source of transmission to humans.”15 Consequently, the fight against the virus that causes rabies requires joint measures, as can be observed both historically and in the present day. This is what was proposed by the foundation of the “One Health” initiative, which calls for coordinated actions to address challenges that impact the stability of human health.16

Likewise, disease control takes place through interactions or “interspecies encounters,” as argued by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing in her 2015 book The Mushroom at the End of the World.17 Among diverse human and non-human conditions, as well as within particular ecosystemic configurations, forms of collaboration are made possible, often reflected in the shaping of structures and dynamics oriented toward the needs of the human species. Thus, the prevention of many diseases (including the prevention of the spread of many diseases), among them rabies, calls for joint efforts between human medicine and veterinary medicine.

This allows us, via an analysis of nineteenth-century Portuguese discourses on rabies, to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the historical roots of the “One Health” perspective. Rabies is recognized as the only Neglected Tropical Disease (NTD)18 that can be effectively prevented through vaccination. Studies on rabies in any field, such as history, can help highlight the importance of vaccines. The disease has been considered eradicated in Portugal since 1961, with the last autochthonous case recorded in the country in 1960. Although Portugal only officially declared eradication decades later, its case followed the broader European context of disease elimination of autochthonous cases,19 as seen in Denmark (1889), Scandinavia (before 1900), Austria (1914), Germany (1914 and subsequently in 1939), the United Kingdom (1922), the Netherlands (1923), the former Czechoslovakia (1930s and 1940s), and Hungary (1930s and 1940s).20

In Portugal, disease control was achieved primarily through the mandatory vaccination of dogs, established by Decree No. 11242 in 1925.21 Eradication has been the result of a successful and well-implemented vaccination program, in which politics, medicine, veterinary science, and society committed themselves to controlling and combating the spread of the rabies virus. In the Netherlands and Germany, the first legislation aimed at controlling rabies in dogs and cats dates back to 1875 and 1880, respectively.22

To address my objective, the article first provides an overview and contextualization of rabies research with regard to the case analyzed in this study. It then presents the sources and background information on the medical training institution of the physicians and authors under study and provides an analysis of how dogs are referenced in works concerned with the understanding of human medicine, as well as how rabies is discussed in the contexts of the connection between dogs, humans, medicine, and medical knowledge. Through this structure, I hope to identify traces of an early initiative that emphasized the need for efforts that value the connection between the various components of the ecosystem shared by the human species.

By addressing aspects of the “One Health” approach, I use historical research as a direct tool to understand and address the challenges of the present. The existence and trajectory of diseases have a significant impact on society. They drive changes within human communities, leading to the emergence of technological and pharmaceutical innovations aimed at promoting health. Diseases foster interaction among various agents,23 including physicians, policymakers, and non-human actors, such as dogs, who are used in the development: of solutions from which society as a whole may benefit.

Rabies and Non-Human Animals in Context

The nineteenth century was a period of profound transformation in medicine. The transition era marked a break with earlier practices, enabling the im­ple­mentation of new procedures, a shift that has been well recognized in the secondary literature.24 From Hippocratic-Galenic to clinical medicine, the agents serving the field of medicine, physicians, surgeons, and pharmacists entered a period marked by the emergence and/or identification of new diseases,25 as well as new forms of treatment.

In Portugal, surgery began to be institutionally recognized in relation to medicine, at least formally, in the eighteenth century, in part as a result of the measures implemented by the Marquis of Pombal and the reforms of the University of Coimbra.26 However, within the medical sphere, it is evident that this equi­valence did not occur immediately, despite being established on paper.27 Only in the nineteenth century can we observe this integration taking place in a more consistent manner, also driven by the abandonment of medical theories that had previously underpinned medical thought and practice. Across the globe, the late eighteenth century marked the conclusion of various processes and the beginning and recognition of different organizational systems across multiple areas of society.28

There is no stage of this transformative period that was carried out solely through human activity. Although historical investigation cannot rely on documentary sources produced by other agents involved in the changes that took place over the centuries discussed here, human-produced sources allow us to inquire into and perceive the presence of these other vectors, such as dogs, in medical writings. In this sense, the case of rabies stands out as a compelling example of the relationship between humans and dogs.

As Abigail Woods states in the book coedited by her entitled Animals and the Shaping of Modern Medicine: Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in Modern History published in 2018,29 rabies has received considerable attention and prominence in historical scholarship. It is a disease transmitted by the animal known in many cultures as “man’s best friend,” and it prompted decisions and public health interventions ranging from prophylaxis to the extermination of dogs showing symptoms of rabies. In Portugal, in her study Allies or Enemies? Dogs in the Streets of Lisbon in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,30 Inês Gomes examines the duality inherent in human coexistence with non-human animals, particularly dogs, whereby an animal regarded as a loyal and faithful companion could, when afflicted with rabies, become a deadly threat.

Woods points to historical studies on rabies in different parts of the world during the same period addressed in this article, including South Africa,31 the United States of America,32 and the United Kingdom,33 in which the dog, along with other disease-transmitting animals, appears as a key vector in understanding the history of rabies.34 Observations regarding the connections between human and animal health are longstanding, and the study of the history of rabies is a relevant and significant topic within this field. One reason for this is the fact that “rabies kills”35 is more than just a slogan, and thus, this is one of the key factors that led the World Health Organization (WHO) to establish World Rabies Day in 2007, observed annually on September 28.36

In Portugal, as shown by historiography and sources explored in the article, the first anti-rabies vaccination took place in Lisbon on January 25, 1893.37 Previously, individuals who had been bitten by rabid animals were sent to Paris, which represented a significant financial investment by the state and a considerable personal effort on the part of the patient. In Lisbon, the first institution to carry out these vaccinations was founded on March 9, 1895. The institution was the Real Instituto Bacteriológico de Lisboa (Royal Bacteriological Institute of Lisbon), with Professor Luiz da Câmara Pestana38 serving as its first director. In northern Portugal, the Pasteur Institute of Porto was inaugurated in 1896,39 just three years after the establishment of the Lisbon institute.

However, as Carlos Alberto Salgado de Andrade notes in his inaugural dissertation, the institute in Porto did not receive any formal funding: “This Institute, without any official support and solely through the initiative of the esteemed clinician Dr. Arantes Pereira, was inaugurated.”40 Before the founding of the Institute in Porto, Alexandra Esteves and Sílvia Pinto explain that patients from northern Portugal had to travel to Lisbon, bringing with them the head of the animal, already dead, so that tests could be conducted to verify the presence of the rabies virus.41

Figure 1. Decree (Ministry of Public Works – Diário do Governo No. 287,
December 17, 1886). Available at: https://legislacaoregia.parlamento.pt/V/1/60/68/p916 (accessed November 12, 2025).

The prevention of the spread of rabies among humans depends on the control of rabies in dogs,42 as the high incidence of the disease was due to attacks by rabid dogs.43 In Lisbon, as early as 1876, there was a directive that mandated a 60-day quarantine in suspected cases and the culling of the animal if rabies was confirmed.44 With regard to the Portuguese State, on December 16, 1886, a decree was issued (Ministry of Public Works, Diário do Governo, no. 287, dated December 17, 1886) approving the organizational plan for livestock services. Among various provisions, the decree included proposals that outlined “Hygienic and Sanitary Police Services for Animals.”45 The document identified epizootic diseases and zoonoses that should be monitored as a prophylactic measure for public health.

Rabies was either included among the group of diseases attributed to specific animals or, in some cases, to all animals. It ranked third in the table listing the “common nomenclature of diseases,” in which all animals were classified under the category of “animal species subject to sanitary regulation.”

At the end of the nineteenth century, the physician Eduardo Abreu was sent by the Portuguese administration, by the Ministry of the Kingdom, to Paris to study the development of the rabies vaccine.46 He eventually became the target of criticism from fellow medical professionals because of the way he conducted experiments on animals, and they questioned Abreu’s understanding of chemical and medical process. Although it has been found that Eduardo Abreu had limited contact with Louis Pasteur, he was undeniably one of the key figures behind the transformative actions of the period under discussion, as already discussed in the secondary literature. He was one of the acknowledged agents in the medical policy measures adopted in Portugal for the control and prevention of rabies.

Regarding Louis Pasteur, historian of medicine and biomedical sciences José Pedro Sousa Dias, in his analysis of the reception of Pasteur’s work, emphasizes that the absence of formal medical education posed significant obstacles in Pasteur’s engagement with the medical community. There are records suggesting that the early stages of Pasteur’s work were accelerated precisely by the fact that he was working with animals and veterinarians. However, once he began engaging with the medical profession, he encountered obstacles that stemmed, in part, from the conservativism and resistance to change that characterized many members of the medical establishment at the time.47

The development of laboratory techniques, new treatment methods, and medications that support human medicine is the result of interdisciplinary efforts. Veterinary medicine played a prominent role in the nineteenth century, as it continues to do today, in the control of zoonoses, such as rabies. Veterinarians were essential in drafting reports and administering vaccines. Nevertheless, as Alexandra Isabel Gomes Marques recounts in her doctoral dissertation, there was a heated debate in the Chamber of Deputies48 aimed at discussing the reorganization of the Bacteriological Institute of Lisbon, which was expected to establish structures for the development of treatment against diphtheria.49

Some of the key figures involved in the debate (for instance, physicians João Franco and António Teixeira de Sousa), although they did not dismiss the contributions of veterinarians, did not support the integration of these professionals into the reform of the Institute. Elvino de Brito, a veterinary physician who advocated for the creation of a specific post for a veterinarian within the Institute, also held differing political affiliations. João Franco and António Teixeira de Sousa belonged to the Regenerator Party,50 while Elvino de Brito was a member of the Progressive Party. To summarize the episode, which is skillfully analyzed by Marques, the reorganization of the Institute did not include the integration of veterinary professionals in the development of diphtheria treatment. In an ironic twist of fate, not long thereafter, Câmara Pestana himself acknowledged having relied on the assistance of a veterinarian to produce the anti-diphtheria serum.51

In late nineteenth-century Portugal, the study and control of rabies reflected broader transformations in the medical science and public health. Figures such as Eduardo Abreu and Luís da Câmara Pestana played important roles in adopting bacteriological methods inspired by Louis Pasteur, despite professional disputes and institutional resistance. The tensions between physicians and veterinarians, which came to the forefront in the debates over the reorganization of the Lisbon Bacteriological Institute, revealed the interdisciplinary challenges and political divisions shaping scientific progress in this period. Human medicine, veterinary medicine, and the environment are strongly interconnected within the public health policy agenda.52 The coexistence of human and non-human within their ecosystems gives rise to interspecies encounters, which foster the emergence of diseases, the development of medicines, new technologies, and new areas of activity within human society.53

The Discourse on Dogs in the Inaugural Dissertations Presented
at the Porto Medical-Surgical School

The primary corpus of sources used in this study consists of a set of inaugural dissertations,54 53 of them, written between 1867 and 1899 and defended and presented at the Porto Medical-Surgical School (EMCP). The school was founded in 1836, and in 1911, upon its integration into the Polytechnic Academy, became part of the University of Porto.55 The texts are currently accessible in the Digital Repository of the University of Porto,56 providing a rich collection for studies in the history of medicine.57 The authors of these dissertations are not prominent figures of Portuguese medicine. Little is known about them. Rather, they are marginalized and overlooked individuals in the historiography of medicine, yet they left behind valuable records that allow us to delve into public health policies and the evolution of medical thought during a profoundly transformative period.58

In all the dissertations under discussion, references to dogs are generally and predominantly though not exclusively associated with rabies. The subject of rabies and dogs also appear in studies that are not directly dedicated to the disease itself, and they are only mentioned as a subsidiary topic. This is the case with the dissertation by João Machado de Araújo, “Breve estudo sobre asepsia em cirurgia” (A brief study on surgical asepsis), defended in 1875,59 the text of Francisco José de Sousa’s “Algumas palavras sobre a opotherapia: tratamento de certas doenças por extractos d’orgãos animais” (Some remarks on opotherapy: the treatment of certain diseases using extracts from animal organs), 1899;60 and the thesis of António Augusto Chaves de Oliveira’s “Estudo sobre os diversos systemas de remoção das immundicias adoptados nas principaes cidades da Europa e sua applicação à cidade do Porto” (Study on the various systems of waste removal adopted in the principal cities of Europe and their application to the city of Porto), defended in 1866.61 Dogs are present in approximately 36 percent of the medical dissertations focused on human medicine that we have analyzed thus far.

Within the collection of works, there are also direct references to rabies in the titles of the dissertations. This is represented by the case of Miguel Carlos Moreira, who defended his dissertation “A Raiva: (estudo historico, clinico e prophylactico)” (Rabies: (historical, clinical, and prophylactic study)62 in 1897 and the case of José da Costa Silva Júnior, who presented “Breve estudo sobre a prophylaxia da raiva” (A brief study on rabies prophylaxis)63 in 1889.

In the case of studies on rabies, it is not surprising to find references to dogs, as they are the primary vectors of transmission to humans and thus appear prominently in works concerning human medical treatment. In dissertations that are not exclusively focused on rabies, certain elements from the tendencies of nineteenth-century medicine can be identified, a context I have emphasized in the thesis statement of this article. What these dissertations mirror is that in the nineteenth century, medicine increasingly incorporated laboratory-based analytical technologies, which helps explain the inclusion of non-human animals, such as dogs, in studies of human medicine. In most cases, these references relate to experiments carried out on these animals.

The inaugural dissertations also support the perception that, within the parameters of Portuguese medicine during the period under analysis, the pace of developments occurring throughout nineteenth-century Europe was being followed. Arnaud Tarantola, in his volume Four Thousand Years of Concepts Relating to Rabies in Animals and Humans, Its Prevention and Its Cure,64 which was published in 2017, points out that extensive experimental work was carried out on the immunization of animals, giving us the example of the German city of Jena in 1804, where physician Georg Gottfried Zinke experimentally transmitted rabies without a bite by applying the saliva of rabid dogs to the tissues of animals. A similar experiment took place in 1813, conducted by Hugo Altgraf zu Salm-Reifferscheidt. Beyond immunization, Tarantola also mentions a case from 1805 in Turin, where Francesco Rossi reported having experimentally transmitted rabies to dogs by inserting segments of the sciatic nerve from rabid cats into a fresh wound.

In the case of Portugal, when reading the inaugural dissertations, one notices that things were not done differently. Experiments with non-human animals were proposed within the field of human medicine in Portugal, too. For example, António José da Mota Campos Júnior, who defended his inaugural dissertation “Estudos recentes sobre o tétano” (Recent studies on tetanus)65 in 1892, made such proposals. Campos Júnior argued that: “it was experimentally demonstrated that the dog is not resistant to a small amount of pure culture. We know that the passage of a virus from one animal species to another sometimes attenuates, sometimes exacerbates its virulence: thus, rabies is attenuated.”66 Discussion of experiments is also included in the work of Júlio Artur Lopes Cardoso, who defended his dissertation “O Micróbio” (The microbe)67 in 1883. He drew the following conclusion: “a small portion of encephalic matter extracted from a rabid individual was introduced into the brain of a dog, and in less than 15 days, the animal developed the disease.”68 In these cases, dogs do not appear as vectors of rabies. On the contrary, they were literally inside the laboratories, in the fight against the disease. Thus, they ceased to be active in the transmission of rabies and became passive vectors, used in the process of developing prophylactic measures against the rabies virus through the medical research conducted by physicians at the Porto Medical-Surgical School.

While dogs appear in historiography in various contexts, in the case of the sources under discussion here, we find references to these animals both in a figurative sense and in human rituals.69 It is worth reiterating that the human species has coexisted with dogs for a very long time, and that the domestication of canines dates back over 5,000 years. More than mere objects at the service of humanity, dogs have contributed to shaping the decisions and procedures adopted by humans.70

It becomes evident that the coexistence between dogs and humans constitutes a significant “interspecies encounter” which, among other factors not addressed in this study, supports the argument that these non-humans contributed to the process of understanding disease transmission to humans. From this coexistence, viewed through the scientific lens adopted in this research, emerged the development of effective treatments for diseases affecting both animals and humans.71

The studies conducted at the Porto Medical-Surgical School reveal that Portuguese physicians were aware of the developments taking place abroad and were actively engaged in scientific research and in the renewal of medical thought across Europe. The analysis presented here has focused on the perception of animals as vectors of disease transmission, as well as tools in the development of experiments. Furthermore, as an analysis of the discourse reveals, the attention devoted by physicians to the roles of canines in the spread of the disease and the experimental procedures they used in the laboratory show clearly that these physicians considered the animals and their relationship to human health an important factor in the search for effective treatments to diseases as early as the nineteenth century.

The medical dissertations defended in Porto reveal that this aspect of human–non-human relationships captured the interest of physicians in the city’s medical school, and that, in harmony with findings in the study of the histories of zoonotic diseases so far, the presence of non-human animals was crucial to the development of various medical treatments, such as vaccines.72 The Pasteur Institute in Paris, one of the major points of reference in scientific research and innovation in the late nineteenth century for Portuguese physicians and physicians worldwide, based much of its laboratory experimentation on the investigation of relationships between humans and non-humans. These early experiments contributed to the development of a notion of health grounded in the interface between human beings, other animals, and the environment, which forms the foundation of the current initiative known as “One Health.”73

Raiva, Aerophobia, Hidrophobia, Tétanorábico…

The nomenclature used to define rabies in the nineteenth century was varied. This is a delicate aspect, as it relates to the different ways in which the same disease was referred to in historical sources, which makes data collection more challenging. Carlos Salgado de Andrade notes in his dissertation that the names by which this disease had been known are numerous and derive from the symptoms manifested in patients, such as intense thirst and a fear of water.74 Indeed rabies can manifest in several forms. Here, we refer specifically to human rabies in its furious form, characterized by hyperactivity, hallucinations, behavioral changes, hydrophobia (fear of water), and, at times, aerophobia (fear of air currents or fresh air).75

Given the nature of some of the symptoms associated with rabies, there were instances in which physicians interpreted them as episodes of madness. It is no coincidence that one of the common ways to refer to a dog afflicted with rabies is as a “mad dog.”

In the case of rabies in other animals, such as dogs, studies since the twentieth century have questioned the diagnosis of hydrophobia in these animals, given that dogs do not develop a fear of water. In 1939, Joaquim Augusto de Barros, in his doctoral thesis in veterinary medicine, asserted that “the rabid dog is not hydrophobic, that is, it does not have a fear of water.”76 In 1950, during a conference held at the Clube Fenianos Portuenses by the Portuguese League for Social Prophylaxis, under the theme “Rabies, a Disease Common to Humans and Animals: Methods of Control and Prophylaxis,” Manuel Lema Monteiro formulated the following argument: “the notion that the rabid animal does not drink and has a fear of water continues to be deeply rooted; and yet, the rabid dog does drink, it drinks frantically.”77

The fight against rabies required care not only for human health but also for the health of other animals. It is important to highlight the varying symptoms of the same disease, which was given different names and presented differently in different organisms, as humans live in communities and as an integral parts of ecosystems. Thus, in order to remain healthy, humans must devote attention to the health of all of the members of these ecosystems.78 The observations made concerning similar symptoms in both humans and animals and the importance of providing care for the health of animals as well as humans may offer albeit modest evidence that among the newly graduated physicians of the EMCP, there was a degree of attention given to dogs, as seen in comments that also attest to the restoration of the animals’ health regarding other diseases. Carlos Alberto Salgado de Andrade, for instance, provided a detailed account of the dog’s behavior:

The animal avoids its owners, retreats to its usual resting place, to the corners of the house, beneath the furniture. It is called and responds, obeying slowly, as if reluctantly; instead of its characteristic joy, it approaches with its body hunched, fur bristled, head lowered, tucked between its paws and beneath its chest […] Appetite then ordinarily decreases, food is chewed with difficulty, and later rejected altogether, with swallowing becoming extremely painful.79

He also highlighted the estimated number of dogs cured through treatment, emphasizing that the number of dogs saved from rabies by this method80 was over 70 percent.81 José da Costa Silva Júnior, who presented “Breve estudo sobre a prophylaxia da raiva” (A brief study on rabies prophylaxis) in 1899, reported that among the 19 vaccinated dogs, not a single case of rabies was observed.82 Thus, the report is not limited to an exclusive discussion of the restoration of human health.

In the nineteenth century, up to the point covered by this study, the only decree or law issued by the Portuguese state concerning animal care is the aforementioned decree (Ministry of Public Works, Diário do Governo, No. 287, December 17, 1886), which approved the organizational plan for livestock services, ordering the monitoring of epizootic diseases. Nevertheless, even if comprehensive legislation was lacking at this point, physicians proposed guidelines on how to handle animals in order to control the transmission of rabies as part of narratives that reflected the medical profession’s role in the organization of society. Once again, Silva Júnior’s thesis can be cited as an example. He stated that, “in regions where the use of a muzzle is adopted, when an unmuzzled dog is seen on the streets, it immediately becomes suspect and should be seized by the competent authorities,” suggesting that the state should finds ways to introduce and enforce rules to control interaction between human and non-human animals.83

Human concern for and relationships with dogs have changed over time, but upon analyzing nineteenth-century discourses, we also find evidence of a more attentive and affectionate form of care, one that condemned the mistreatment of these animals. The following excerpt provides an example of this approach:

Poisoning of stray dogs. Unfortunately, our police make use of this method in the very place where the animals are found—a degrading practice, almost entirely abandoned elsewhere—because these animals, in the throes of a terrible agony, provoke public outrage, often leading to acts of revenge against the agents of this practice, which common sense and humanity alike condemn.84

We aim to argue that the inaugural dissertations defended at the Porto Medical-Surgical School reveal that nineteenth-century Portuguese medicine actively participated in the broader European scientific transformations of its time. The presence of dogs, whether as experimental subjects, disease vectors, or recipients of medical care, illustrates the complex and evolving understanding of human–animal relationships within medical thought. Far from being marginal references, these animals became essential to the development of experimental practices, the study of zoonotic diseases, and the emergence of preventive measures such as vaccination. Moreover, the diversity of terms used to describe rabies and its symptoms underscores both the diagnostic challenges of the period and the evolving nature of medical classification. Ultimately, these dissertations not only attest to Portugal’s engagement with contemporary scientific advances but also highlight an early awareness of the interconnectedness between human and animal health, an idea that foreshadows the modern concept of “One Health.”

Final Consideration

Rabies, that could be mistaken for an episode of madness, in the nineteenth century, was a disease that concerned Portuguese society, prompting action by political authorities, supported by medical and public health knowledge, to combat the threat. The role of human medicine, in conjunction with veterinary medicine, was one of the key elements that strengthened the response, and to this day, prophylaxis in non-human animals remains the most effective means of preventing rabies outbreaks. This study contributes to the analysis of the presence of canines in the dissertations by physicians in Porto in the nineteenth century, shedding some light on shifting understandings of the relationship between humans and non-humans in the past. It reflects a complex interaction among humans, dogs, the environment, and medicine, with implications for the factors that influenced public health within the Portuguese medical context.

The article provides an overview and contextualization of rabies research, with a focus on the presence of a non-human animal. The selected sources offer insights into the medical knowledge produced at the Porto Medical-Surgical School, which aligned with European medical thought during the period under study. Within these sources, focused primarily on human medicine, non-human animals, particularly dogs, are also present, demonstrating that the development of medical techniques and scientific observations relied on the presence of both human and non-human animals. Consequently, this underpins the thesis that the history of human medicine is not shaped by humans alone. The sources present early traces of what later, in the second half of the twentieth century, would come to represent the “One Health” approach, even before the formal articulation and institutionalization of the concept. The article therefore considers the history of medicine as a field, which can also be written as a history of “interspecies encounters,” where non-human animals, such as dogs, are present and participate, even if indirectly, in decision-making processes and the shaping of agendas aimed at addressing the challenges faced by human society.

Archival Sources

Biblioteca Pública Municipal do Porto [Municipal Library of Porto]

582.1939. Joaquim Augusto de Barros. “Diagnóstico da Raiva no cão.” Tese de douto­ramento em Medicina Veterinária. Escola Superior de Medicina Veterinária, 1929.

3.1. 72.13. Monteiro M L. Liga Portuguesa de Profilaxia Social. “A raiva, doença comum ao homem e aos animais. Métodos de combate e profilaxia.” Conferência Realizada no Clube Fenianos Portuenses, em 4 de julho de 1950.

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The Beginnings of Pediatric Psychiatry in the Czech Lands

Helena Chalupová

Charles University

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 14 Issue 4 (2025): 537-562 DOI 10.38145/2025.4.537

Records concerning mental disorders among children are sparse for the earliest period of the field of psychiatry in Bohemia, but they do exist. For a long time, however, no public care was actually available for mentally ill children. This paper investigates the formation of child psychiatry as a separate field in the Czech Lands, tracing the emergence of public care for mentally ill children and the establishment of the first educational institutions for children and adolescents. In Bohemia, these efforts date to 1871, when Karel Slavoj Amerling founded the Ernestinum, an institute for “feebleminded” children in Prague. In 1902, the first outpatient clinic for child psychiatry was established in Prague by Karel Herfort, the first professor of child psychopathology in Bohemia.

Keywords: pediatric psychiatry, mental disorders, children, Ernestinum, Karel Slavoj Amerling, Karel Herfort

Introduction

Miroslava, born in 1900, came into a family that was unable to provide even basic care, let alone love and safety. She was the only one of twelve children to survive and arrived at the Ernestinum institution as an orphan. Her father died in an asylum, and her mother succumbed to emphysema. Her childhood, marked by mental illness, physical ailments, neglect, and poverty, led her to institutional care, where she was placed more out of necessity than from any understanding of her needs. Medical records describe her as a thin, weak, and neglected girl whose development was delayed and who suffered not only from physical frailty but also from speech and cognitive disorders. From the outset, Miroslava’s life was a chain of defeats over which she had no control. At the Ernestinum institution, she was given—for the first time—a regular routine, professional supervision, and at least the basic conditions for a dignified life. Yet the scars of the past could not be erased. Her sick body and fragile psyche bore deep wounds.1

Miroslava’s story is a reminder of a time when children with similar fates could end up in anonymous institutions, far from home, dependent on the goodwill of caregivers or the pity of their families or local communities if they were not placed in institutional care. It also bears witness to the prevailing view of intellectual disability and impairment at the time, which was judged more by merits of alleged societal usefulness than by human dignity. Her fate reminds us that behind every medical record lies a real child, with a name, a face, and an unheard story.

This story of a girl born in 1900 serves as a starting point for an analysis of the development of institutional care for children with intellectual disabilities in the Czech Lands at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her fate, marked by neglect, illness, and institutionalization, reflects contemporary notions of usefulness, normality, and the perceived value of a child. Yet this case is not merely an individual narrative; it is symptomatic of broader structural transformations that shaped the emergence of child psychiatry as a distinct field.

This study aims to examine how a system of care for children with intellectual disabilities was formed in the Czech Lands, situating this development within wider Central European discourses and institutional practices. Particular attention is paid to the Ernestinum institute, the first facility for so-called “feebleminded” children in the Czech Lands, and its role in the professionalization of care. The Czech case is contextualized within the framework of the Habsburg Monarchy, where similar institutions were established in other regions (e.g., Austria and Hungary), offering a comparative perspective on the evolution of specialized care.

The term “feebleminded child” during the period under study was used to refer to a broad spectrum of individuals, from children with intellectual disabilities to those on the autism spectrum and even to children whose behavior deviated from prevailing social norms. In some cases, this designation was also associated with physical disabilities. This diagnostic ambiguity reflects the epistemological limitations of the time, while also illustrating why specialized institutions gradually emerged, not only to classify these children but also to provide education and care for them within the framework of a newly developing system.

In the discussion below, I trace the formation of child psychiatry as a separate field in the Czech Lands and describe the beginnings of public care for mentally ill children, especially the foundation of the first educational and care institution for children and adolescents. I focus on the development of a system of care for mentally disadvantaged persons in the Czech Lands in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries until the outbreak of World War I. I explain some key concepts and situate the development in the Czech Lands in a wider European context. Finally, I will introduce the activities of the Ernestinum Institute in Prague and analyze published case studies pertaining to its inhabitants. The study of these historical examples is interesting not only in and of itself; it also has the potential to enrich our understanding of the current forms of institutional care for children who face mental and intellectual challenges.

The key features of child psychiatry (pedo-psychiatry) were specified in detail only in 1933.2 Child psychiatry, which includes both psychotherapy and care for the mental health of children and adolescents, is thus a relatively young field. It is at the intersection of medicine, pedagogy, psychology, and sociology, which reflects the complexity of human development and the importance of care for mental health from an early age. This field, which gradually emerged over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, underwent significant development in the Czech Lands. Its history reflects a growing awareness of the specific needs of mental health care for children and the roles of various factors, including genetic, environmental, and educational ones.

The secondary literature on the history of child psychiatry and mental disease in children is not extensive. So far, the most thorough book on this topic is the work of the German physician Gerhardt Nissen,3 who focuses on German-speaking lands and traces how both the understanding and treatment of mental disorders in children and adolescents developed over the centuries. Before the nineteenth century, mental disorders in children were usually either overlooked or ascribed to supernatural powers. Gradually, people began to seek natural causes, and more humane approaches to treatment were proposed. This contributed to the emergence of psychiatry and psychotherapy for children and adolescents as separate fields. In the Czech Lands, the subject (or topos) of so-called “feebleminded” children4 has often been associated with an interest in special education and therefore studied as part of the history of education and pedagogical analyses. Studies on educators dedicated to the education of mentally disadvantaged children are few and far between.5

Child psychiatry is thus a multidisciplinary subject. In the context of the Czech Lands, researchers can draw on sources in Czech, Slovak, and German, reflecting the linguistic and cultural landscape of the region during the historical periods under discussion.6 For example, contemporary publications on special education in these languages offer valuable insights. An older summary of the history of care for “feebleminded” children was written by Karel Herfort.7 Among the relevant primary sources for the late nineteenth and early twentieth century include the collection Zemský výbor Praha 1874–1928 (Provincial Com­mittee Prague, 1874–1928), kept in the National Archives of the Czech Republic. Here, one finds some sources pertaining to the Ernestinum, the first institution dedicated to caring for “feebleminded” children, which was founded in 1871.8 Unfortunately, all surviving sources relate only to a later period of this institute’s existence, after 1909. For the earlier phases of its existence, one must rely on various published bulletins and other publications by the Ernestinum’s directors, Karel Slavoj Amerling (1807–1884)9 and the aforementioned Karel Herfort (1871–1940).10

Terminology and Basic Definitions

In the nineteenth century, research on mental disorders in children was based primarily on the knowledge at the time of psychological disorders in adults. Only much later did physicians realize that, in mentally disturbed children, symptoms do not correspond to what is found in adults and therefore require specific diagnostic methods and therapeutic approaches.11 For a long time, there was no clinical definition of the concept of “feeblemindedness.”12 In German, we find it described with a number of terms, such as Minderwertigkeit (inferiority), Schwachsinn (feeblemindedness), and Abnormität (abnormality). In the Czech language of the late nineteenth century, physicians described children with the words slabomyslný (feebleminded), úchylný (deviant, i.e., not conforming to the norm), and eventually duševně vadný (mentally defective).13 In psychiatry, the term “oligophrenia” was later used with the same meaning.14 Ottův slovník naučný (Otto’s Encyclopedia), published in Prague by the publishing house Ottovo nakladatelství between 1888 and 1909, is a comprehensive Czech-language reference work consisting of 28 volumes. It continues to serve as a reliable source of historical data within Czech academic discourse, particularly concerning the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The encyclopedia characterizes intellectual disability using the term “stupidity,” 15 defined as a deficiency in cognitive capacity. At the time, congenital mental impairment was commonly attributed to factors such as parental alcoholism,16 consanguinity, hereditary predisposition,17 or perinatal brain injury. Furthermore, childhood mental disorders were frequently believed to be associated with physical impairments, including hearing loss and other somatic disabilities.18

These assumptions were part of a broader historical context in which the medical supervision of reproduction began to take shape. The foundations of such oversight were laid in the nineteenth century, particularly during the Enlightenment and within the Habsburg Monarchy, when the state started to regard public health as a strategic concern. Gradually, the idea emerged that fertility, population health, and the perceived “quality” of the citizenry should be subject to expert and political regulation. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, physicians increasingly positioned themselves as authorities on both the human body and society, which significantly influenced reproductive discourse. At the turn of the century, eugenic ideas gained traction in the Czech lands, largely due to neurologist Ladislav Haškovec, who founded Česká eugenická společnost (the Czech Eugenic Society) in 1915.19

It was assumed that feebleminded individuals focused mainly on satisfying their basic instincts. Feeblemindedness was defined as a “less severe form of innate idiocy” that found manifestation in a reduced ability to comprehend the world. Children with this affliction, it was posited, could nevertheless be brought up so that, in adulthood, they would be capable of managing in the general environment thanks to their ability to imitate proper, “normal” behaviors. Even so, any nonstandard situation demanding independent decision-making would immediately reveal their helplessness.20 Herfort used the following classification:

1. Feebleminded incapable of education (that is, neither work nor schooling). In this case, one should speak of idiots.
2. Feebleminded capable of education, that is, imbeciles, who can be either

1. capable of work

1. capable of both schooling and work; these are referred to as debilové (morons).21

To describe intellectual and mental anomalies, terms such as idiocy or imbecility were used, and children with this diagnosis could be put in a mental institution, though for a long time only among adults. They were considered ineducable and untreatable, and no personality progress was expected. What physicians nevertheless assessed was the level of children’s cognitive abilities, differentiating between “stupidity,” “idiocy,” “imbecility,”22 and “cretinism.”23

Nevertheless, as German psychiatrist Herman Emminghaus (1845–1904) reported, for instance, the English psychiatrist Henry Maudsley (1835–1918) also diagnosed other disorders in children, such as manias, melancholy, epileptic and choreic psychoses, as well as either affective or moral madness linked to inherited predispositions. The latter included some behaviors which today we would not include among mental disorders, such as egoism, various bad habits that can lead to destructive behaviors, violence, murderous inclinations, or premature sexual desires. According to views at the time, “morally mad children” were characterized by mental laziness which found expression in an unwillingness and inability to be educated, and they had a tendency to cheat and lie.24 Various experts, including Herfort, also investigated possible links between mental and physical handicaps in children, and patients in his institution were carefully examined and treated also regarding their physical health.25 Herfort is regarded as the founder of child psychiatry in the Czech lands. In 1902, he began to serve as a physician at the Ernestinum, the first institution in Prague dedicated to the education of individuals with intellectual disabilities, located in the Šternberk Palace in Hradčany. He later served as its director. I touch on further details concerning his work and legacy in the discussion below.

Another important concept in this context is “special education.” This term was first used in Czechoslovakia in 1954 and has been in regular used since 1972 (between these years, experts used the term “defectology”). In earlier times, terms such as “remedial education” and, in the German-speaking lands, “Heilpädagogik” (therapeutic education) were used.26 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we can also see the development of paedology, a theoretical approach to new trends in education, and pedo-pathology, which focused on children who did not meet the generally accepted norms.27

The Beginnings of Pediatric Psychiatry

Child psychiatry started to develop as a specific discipline in the nineteenth century, when physicians and educators started to study mental disorders in children systematically. In the early nineteenth century, a children’s ward was created in Paris at the psychiatry clinic in Bicêtre. This approach to care focused mainly on children with mental retardation and problematic behaviors, such as delinquency. Of key importance was Philippe Pinel’s 1811 study on oligophrenia, which described the case of a feral child found in Aveyron. The cases of the Bavarian Kaspar Hauser and Victor of Aveyron,28 as this boy came to be known, both involved children who grew up in extreme isolation. Victor also suffered from severe mental and emotional retardation: he was severely oligophrenic and mostly incapable of verbal communication. Pinel considered this child ineducable and inferior even to domestic pets. He believed that Victor had a chronic and untreatable mental disorder. The French physician who specialized in otology, Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard, on the other hand, dedicated five years to Victor’s care and managed to achieve some improvement in his social behaviors. Victor learned how to put on his clothes, he stopped urinating in public, he was able to differentiate between hot and cold, and he developed an emotional attachment to his caregiver. Nevertheless, despite various efforts, he did not learn how to speak.29

The development of child psychiatry went hand in hand with advances in education. For instance, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Italian educator Maria Montessori focused on the treatment and education of children with mental handicaps, developed methods of educating children with various developmental disorders, and later trained special education teachers.30 A little earlier, in 1887, the aforementioned Emminghaus, the founder of developmental psychopathology, published the first textbook of child psychiatry, Die Psychischen Störungen des Kindesalters (Mental Disorders of Childhood).31 In this volume, he highlighted the differences between the mental lives of children and adults and emphasized that these differences must be taken into consideration in both diagnostics and treatment. Nevertheless, until approximately the mid-nineteenth century, the education of so-called feebleminded children took place in charitable institutions that were not part of the general educational system.

Emminghaus noted that child psychiatry is closely related to pediatrics:32

Nowadays, a pediatrician is both an anatomist and physiologist, a pathologist and child hygienist. He knows children healthy and ill, in all situations of life […] He works ahead of the psychotherapist, as required by his profession. Without giving it a second thought, he develops psychology suited especially to children, and it is a natural, not systematic but intuitive psychology, which […] grasps the main aspects of pathological psychic states of children. […] A psychiatrist is also an anatomist, physiologist, and pathologist in the area of central organs of the nervous system. Detailed psychological work, where he investigates and proposes clinical diagnoses, has become second nature to him. […] In any case, however, a physician is more familiar with the anatomical and physiological properties and diseases of the central organs of adults. Although he is well acquainted with the psychological characteristics of childhood, he does not live with them as a pediatrician does, because he is the first person to whom they reach out. […] The mental life of children, both healthy and ill, is quite incommensurable with that of adults.33

Emminghaus’s study opened the door to a systematic study of psychic disorders of children in Central Europe. By emphasizing the differences between the mental lives of children and the mental lives of adults, he laid the foundations of child psychiatry as a separate field. He noted that, in children, intelligence, morality, and free will are not yet fully developed, and the behaviors of children are driven by desires and emotions, not by rational motivations.34 Contemporary physiological psychology did not pay sufficient attention to the specific features of a child’s psyche, leading to an absence of suitable diagnostic methods. Emminghaus also stated that the psychological development of children involves various stages of natural deviations, whereby significant abnormalities, such as premature intellectual or sexual maturity on the one hand or developmental delays on the other, can indicate a mental disorder. In practice, however, it is difficult to draw a clear distinction between a significant abnormality and behavior that is still part of the natural developmental process. Emminghaus also remarked that children have not yet reached their full intellectual potential, have little moral sense and free will, and they have some other specific psychological characteristics that disappear in adulthood.

Differences between children and adults can be observed not only in their thinking and emotions but also in the physiological aspects of mental disorders. Psychic disorders in children can persist into adulthood, but in some cases, they are in short duration, for instance in the case of pathological affects or a fit of rage. Still, such manifestations cannot be explained as mere temporary deviations from normal development. In many cases, they reflect deep changes in the child’s psyche and require comprehensive treatment. Emminghaus also stressed the need for more case studies, since such material would contribute to a more systematic understanding of psychoses in children.

“Feebleminded” Children in the Czech Lands and Their Treatment
in the Ernestinum

The 1863 law on the right of domicile made explicit the legal obligation to provide care for so-called feebleminded children. According to this law, the inhabitants of a city, town, or village were eligible for charitable funds to alleviate social issues and poverty. These funds were to be provided by the given municipality.35 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Czech Lands reinforced various measures to link treatment with education, that is, to rehabilitate handicapped persons and to (re)integrate them into society. If children were incapable of such improvement, they gradually fell under institutional care. An important organ that advocated improvements in public care for the mentally ill was the Provincial Committee, which was elected by the Bohemian Diet.36

In the last third of the nineteenth century, special schools and institutes for children with mental disorders were opened in the Czech Lands. The Ernestinum, which as mentioned above was founded in 1871 in Prague, was one of these institutions. It was headed by Amerling, who remained in this unsalaried position until his death. The institute was initially located in Kateřinská Street in Prague, but it later acquired a permanent seat in the Sternberg Palace in Hradčany, the castle district of Prague. Between 1871 and 1898, the institution bore the name Ústav idiotů Jednoty paní sv. Anny v Praze (Institute for Idiots of the Association of Ladies and Maids of Saint Anne in Prague). Until 1879, Countess Maria Anna Franziska Desfours-Walderode, née Mayer von Mayersbach (1819–1879) was the leading figure and president of the society, as well as a generous sponsor. She also left the association and the institute a financial bequest in her will. Following her death, Countess Ernestina von Auersperg, née Festetics of Tolna (1831–1908), assumed leadership. In her honor, the institution was renamed Ernestinum in 1898. In the 1890s, Ernestina von Auersperg played a key role in modernizing both the building and the institute’s facilities, as well as its therapeutic approaches.37 At her initiative, Karel Herfort was appointed to the staff. A commemorative volume published by the Saint Anna Women’s Association offers words of strong praise for Countess Ernestina: “Ernestina was, is, and remains the helmswoman who, with trust in God, steered the vessel of the institution for forty years—whether it sailed smoothly across oceans under clear sunshine and favorable winds, or whether the skies were shrouded in heavy clouds and fierce storms raged.”38 The third president of the association was Ernestina von Auersperg (1862–1935), the namesake niece of her predecessor, whom she succeeded in 1901.39 After Amerling’s death, the institute was headed by his wife, Františka Svatava Amerlingová (1812–1887), then by their nephew Čeněk Amerling, and after his resignation, by Herfort.40

In his institution, Amerling advocated for the integration of education, medical care, and nature as a comprehensive approach to nurturing the development of children with intellectual disabilities. He believed in the healing power of nature, which he regarded as a fundamental element of mental balance and regeneration. Playful forms of instruction and practical activities were incorporated into the daily routine, thereby fostering the active engagement of the children in the learning process. He placed particular emphasis on manual skills, intended to promote future self-sufficiency and social integration. His methods were grounded in the principles of moral therapy, which emphasized a calm environment, respect, and human dignity. Elements of Amerling’s approach can be seen today in ecotherapy, horticultural therapy, and therapeutic play, with the combination of nature, movement, and creativity aligning with contemporary trends in child psychiatry. His vision was ahead of its time and continues to inspire modern therapeutic and educational practices. In 1883, the institute cared for 60 children and adolescents. Perhaps unsurprisingly, children who were aggressive, impulsive, or in other ways engaged in dangerous behaviors required increased supervision. Increased supervision was required for very quiet children, whose behavior normally gave no reason for concern, which is why it was all the more shocking when they suddenly did something dangerous. Amerling also noted that the children at the institute often took to music and arts but only rarely managed to learn to read, write, or count well.41 The scope of the institute’s activities was nevertheless limited by the fact that it was operated not by the state but by a private association of wealthy women. It thus could not count on systematic or long-term financial support.42

For comparison, at the time of its founding, the Ernestinum was the only institution in all of Austria dedicated to children with intellectual disabilities. This was preceded by two attempts by Austrian physicians to establish institutions for the mentally impaired, one in Salzburg in 1828 and another near Vienna in 1856.43 These institutions, however, did not remain open for long. The emergence of institutions specializing in children with intellectual disabilities in Austria can be observed only in the 1890s, such as the Kierling-Gugging institute near Klosterneuburg.44 In Hungary, specialized institutions for children with intellectual disabilities began to appear only at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, often under the influence of German and Austrian models. A key figure in this development was Jakab Frimm (1852–1923), a physician and educator who played a significant role in introducing pedology and special education in Hungary in the 1880s and 1890s. Frimm worked in Pest as a teacher and later as an inspector of schools for children with disabilities, where he advocated for the integration of medicine and pedagogy in the diagnosis and education of children with intellectual disabilities. His work emphasized the importance of systematic observation, individualized approaches, and the development of practical skills. His approach bore affinities with the efforts of Karel Herfort in the Czech lands. Frimm published methodological manuals for teachers and actively promoted the use of ability tests, while simultaneously warning against their mechanical application without consideration of broader contextual factors.45

The next important step was the foundation of so-called auxiliary schools. The first such institute was founded in 1896 in Prague, and further schools in other towns and cities soon followed. These schools not only educated children but also taught them practical skills needed for their integration into society. In the early twentieth century, physicians, educators, and psychologists also had an opportunity to discuss the subject of children’s mental health at a series of conferences that took place in 1909, 1911, and 1913. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, several international congresses were held addressing the issue of children with intellectual disabilities. Among the most active participants in these events was Karel Herfort. The primary impetus for organizing Czech conferences on this topic was the Third Austrian Conference on the Problem of Intellectual Disability, which had taken place in Vienna three years earlier, in 1906. Here, Herfort served as vice-chairman.46 Such initiatives supported the development of child psychiatry as a multidisciplinary field. They laid the foundations for modern approaches to the diagnostics and treatment of mental disorders in children and adolescents and contributed to the eventual creation of the modern organizational structure of care for “feebleminded” children and the field of special education.47

The Activities of Karel Herfort

As noted above, in the fields of medical and social care in the Czech Lands, the most notable pioneer of child psychiatry was Professor Karel Herfort. Herfort began his career as a physician in the provincial institute for the mentally ill in Dobřany48 in the western part of Bohemia, where he had opportunities to observe patients and was thus able to formulate his own views on psychopathology. In 1902, he accepted a position in the Ernestinum in Prague, which specialized in providing care for “feebleminded” children. One year later, he was appointed director of the institute. His approach combined medicine, pedagogy, and psychology. He repeatedly emphasized that no child should be labelled “ineducable,” and he called for an individual approach to each child.

The novelty and significance of Herfort’s ideas lay in his emphasis on educating so-called feebleminded children. He highlighted the benefits of illustrative, entertaining, and practical education tailored to the needs of each child, and he stressed the beneficial effects of rural settings on the mental and physical health of children.49

Child psychiatry in the Czech Lands was characterized by close links between psychology and pedagogy, both in theory and in practice. Herfort, for instance, studied medicine, but he also worked as an educator, and he collaborated over the course of his life with teachers at the abovementioned auxiliary schools. The effort that went into providing a suitable education for “feebleminded” children was considerable. Herfort’s insight into the pedagogical essence of the issue was admirable: his insistence on the notion that there was no child who could not benefit from an education was grounded on the idea that education ought to be understood in a broader sense, that is, as methods leading to improvement in an individual’s mental and physical wellbeing.

Herfort advocated for the use of manual activities and physical education as the most effective approach to educating children with intellectual disabilities. He criticized attempts to apply standard curricula with merely reduced expectations, arguing that such methods failed to accommodate the specific cognitive limitations of these children and thus could lead to mental overload. Instead, Herfort promoted a practically oriented educational model focused on developing skills and competencies directly relevant to everyday life and future self-sufficiency. Physical education, in his view, served to enhance muscular strength and improve motor coordination. However, he placed particular emphasis on manual work, which he regarded not only as a means of cultivating technical proficiency and preparing children for potential engagement in craft-based vocations, but also as a multidimensional pedagogical tool. According to Herfort, manual activities foster concentration, attention, creativity, imagination, and inventiveness. They contribute to the development of both fine and gross motor skills and exert a formative and therapeutic influence. His pedagogical approach was grounded not in abstract theory but in experiential learning and active engagement. He believed that genuine progress in children with intellectual disabilities arises not from the accumulation of knowledge but from guiding the body and hands toward purposeful activity, autonomy, and practical applicability in real-life contexts.50

Herfort’s case studies offer an overall impression of the children at the Ernestinum.51 Each such study included the child’s first name, sex, age, and family background, but any further information was anonymized. First, Herfort described some cases of “severe idiocy,” that is, children in whom any considerable progress in their mental or physical state was considered very unlikely. Based on their behaviors, it was thought they could not be trained in a craft or any other activity that would enable them to support themselves and live independently. In the case histories, we find various complications, such as genetic disadvantage, illness in childhood, or various accidents. Alcoholism in the family is found only in one case. In several cases involving children with intellectual disabilities, Herfort investigated the potential impact of sexually transmitted infections (particularly syphilis and gonorrhea) that were present in the parents. Moreover, in each of these cases, the given patient’s family members were incapable of providing care.

In its inaugural year, the Ernestinum admitted only ten children, despite overwhelming public interest in such an institution, as evidenced by 205 recorded applications for child placement. However, according to documents from the Association of Ladies and Girls of St. Anne, public financial contributions during the first year of the institution’s existence were exceedingly rare, and efforts to persuade the public of the necessity of such a facility proved challenging. Subsequently, the institution was granted use of the Sternberg Palace in Hradčany, which enabled it to expand and take in more children. According to data from annual reports, the institution cared for a total of 906 children between 1871 and 1911. In 1911, 136 residents were housed at the facility. It is estimated that within the Monarchy, as many as 10,000 children in need lacked access to charitable institutions of other types (e.g., institutes for the blind, orphanages, general psychiatric hospitals, etc.). Most of these children came from the territory of Bohemia, with only a small proportion coming from other regions of the Monarchy.52

During Herfort’s tenure at the Ernestinum, admission to the institution was restricted to children under the age of 13, provided they were deemed capable of personal development through education and had not been diagnosed with any infectious diseases. Emphasis was placed on individualized care, hygiene, and the assessment of intellectual capacity. Care was predominantly provided by female staff, primarily composed of religious sisters, although the exact staff-to-child ratio remains unknown. Funding was provided by charitable associations, notably the Association of Ladies and Maids of St. Anne, which organized philanthropic collections supported by prominent members of the House of Habsburg, including Empress Elisabeth of Austria, Dowager Crown Princess Stéphanie of Belgium, and Archduchess Marie Valerie of Austria. Sometimes, the children’s families made financial contributions. However, Herfort advocated for solidarity and systemic state support, rather than differentiating care based on the financial means of individual families. For instance, thanks to subsidies from the Provincial Committee, the Ernestinum was able to admit 50 children from destitute backgrounds.53

Moreover, in each of these cases, family members were unable to provide adequate care for the children. A typical scenario involved the child’s mother having been abandoned by her partner, which, combined with the necessity of employment, rendered her incapable of ensuring appropriate care. In such instances, the Ernestinum functioned as “a respite facility.” The shared characteristics of these children allegedly included apathy and a lack of interest in their surroundings or, in contrast, restlessness and aggressivity. Their language development is described as delayed or as having come to a full halt, and the same applied to their hygienic habits and social skills. Some of these children even had to leave the Ernestinum due to their alleged “unmanageability.” They were then admitted to the Prague institute for the mentally ill. However, no information is available regarding the specific methods of treatment used for the children in the institute in Prague.

It is likely that these children suffered some form of moderate to severe mental retardation, in some cases accompanied by damage to the central nervous system. Generally speaking, therapy in these children may have focused on the development of basic self-care, social skills, and the reduction of aggressive behaviors. In children who were incapable of communicating clearly, therapeutic efforts sometimes aimed to nurture these skills, for instance through the use of visual or alternative methods (pictograms, gestures). In Herfort’s times, nonverbal children were likely to be excluded from care due to their inability to communicate with a therapist and thus achieve further progress.54

These children came from different socioeconomic circumstances, but most were from lower to middle class families. In every case, the families were fully dependent on the Ernestinum as the only institution in Bohemia that could provide care for their offspring. Some of the children in the care of these Ernestinum were orphans who had no support from their families (or no family members to provide support), and some were from families that belonged to the lower social classes or families that had been affected by alcoholism and sexually transmitted diseases. These children also tended to suffer from various physical ailments, sometimes due to poor nutrition.55 The cost of their care was fully covered by the Bohemian Provincial Council.

In the second group, Herfort included children whom he described as suffering not only from severe idiocy (like the children in the first group), but also from epileptic seizures of varying severity, which led to mental stagnation and delayed development. They were notable for fits of rage, inappropriate or dangerous behaviors, and poor hygienic habits. More generally, they demonstrated abnormal behaviors and an inability to react properly or predictably to common stimuli. Their backgrounds varied. Some were from families that belonged to the lower class (laborers or small farmers), while others hailed from upper-middle-class families (lawyers, professors), but socioeconomic background seemed to have little effect on their health. Children from wealthier families had access to better care (for instance, a university professor was able to pay for his son’s stay in a private sanatorium in Grinzing, near Vienna), but even in these cases, the results were limited due to the severity of the children’s health issues. In this group, the diagnostic reports indicate likely damage to the central nervous system after severe epileptic seizures, high fevers, scarlatina, or perinatal hypoxia. Herfort regarded these children as incapable of education (which admittedly contracted his belief, mentioned in the discussion above, that no child was unable to benefit from some education), but he did not indicate, in his records, whether they were dismissed from the Ernestinum. He may have thought that, with suitable care, they might improve.56 At the time, however, physicians did not yet have at their disposal any anti-epileptic medication that could minimize the intensity of epileptic seizures in children. Bromide had been used since 1857, but only rarely and only in women, and after 1912, phenobarbital was also available,57 but Herfort makes no mention of having prescribed such medication for his patients. Thus, the only thing he could do was to minimize the factors that might trigger epileptic seizures.

Herfort does not describe physical restraints as a standard method. Rather, they were used only in exceptional cases and only temporarily, primarily for safety purposes. Emphasis was placed on non-medical therapeutic approaches, such as psychotherapy, structured daily routines, physical activity, and occupational engagement. The primary triggers of seizures included stress, disorder, and weakened discipline, as well as the children’s prior adverse family environments. Consequently, the staff sought to mitigate these factors by fostering a calm institutional atmosphere, implementing a restorative regimen, maintaining discipline, and providing firm yet compassionate guidance. Additionally, children were engaged in purposeful activities, such as handicrafts and occupational therapy.58

Herfort also lists a number of cases of children and adolescents from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds whose stay in the institute led to partial success. Some children and youngsters learned to read better and were better able to take care of themselves, but few were ready for independent life. In his notes concerning each of these individuals, Herfort mentions delayed development of speech and motor abilities as well as a limited ability to do basic math. Their shared characteristics included problems with aggression, anger, or inappropriate behavior in the company of others, as well as an inability to engage in more complex manual tasks. Nevertheless, Herfort’s institute tried to provide them training based on their individual abilities. It tended to focus on manual skills, such as carpentry, basketweaving, bookbinding, and painting, as well as labor in the field, gardening, etc. The goal was to ensure that the patients would be able to find employment upon leaving the institute. Still, in many cases, the youngsters were not capable of independent life, even after having had intensive care.

For instance, with regards to a 15-year-old child named Vilém, Herfort notes that, although in the institute he functioned as a capable assistant of the head gardener, after leaving the institute, he was unable to keep any job for a longer period of time. People apparently ridiculed him and showed him little respect, which quite possibly made Vilém’s feel isolated and led to aggressive reactions and loss of employment.59

Herfort also mentions three individuals who stayed in the institute voluntarily for their entire lives. In effect, they were unable to live outside the institute. In the case of one female, Johanna, this was associated with sexual abuse by various men, repeated pregnancies, and a number of illegitimate children. In each of these cases, the individuals had limited education, and their abilities were limited to simple or repetitive manual work.60

In the twentieth century, child psychiatry started to focus on newly identified psychic disorders and their treatment. Frequently debated subjects included, for instance, autistic disorders (which were initially considered a form of childhood schizophrenia), bipolar disorder, self-harm, and the consequences of sexual abuse. Considerable attention was also paid to more accurate diagnostics and the creation of standardized treatment methods. This shift was closely linked to the development of biological psychiatry, which emphasized the neurobiological and genetic underpinnings of mental disorders. The standardization of diagnostic criteria, particularly through instruments such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (or DSM, the first edition of which was published in 1952 by the American Psychiatric Association), enabled more precise differentiation of individual conditions and the formulation of targeted treatment protocols. Developmental psychology and trauma research also played a significant role, contributing to a deeper understanding of children’s psychological development. As a result, child psychiatry evolved into an interdisciplinary field, integrating neuroscience, psychology, and the study of a given child’s broader social context.61

An important phenomenon of this time was the emergence of pediatric pathology, which focused on children whose behaviors did not conform to the norm. The case studies from the Ernestinum present children whose behaviors significantly diverged from the societal norms of their time. A representative example is a girl named Anežka, who was described in school records as “very wicked.” At the age of eleven, she was still attending the second grade of elementary school, where she exhibited aggressive behavior toward her peers, including hitting, kicking, frequently disrupting lessons, and negatively influencing other children through her inappropriate conduct. She was disobedient, repeatedly ran away from home, and committed theft, and her actions were considered not only pedagogically challenging but also morally deviant. From the perspective of society at the time, she was viewed as a child who defied standards of obedience and proper conduct.62 Similarly problematic was a twelve-year-old boy named Antonín. From an early age, he displayed signs of restlessness, and he was virtually unmanageable during his school years, leaving his seat during lessons, causing disturbances, shouting, and drumming on his desk during communal prayer. His interactions with peers were inappropriate. He kissed classmates, stole money from home to buy sweets and toys, and occasionally engaged in public masturbation. He frequently started fires and destroyed property, such as setting curtains ablaze. His behavior was characterized as unrestrained and dangerous both to himself and to others and was thus deemed seriously socially unacceptable.63 Both Anežka and Antonín offer archetypal cases of children who failed to respect the organs of authority, school norms, or family expectations of their time. Their behaviors, which ranged from aggression and theft to destructive acts, were interpreted as moral and social failures. At the Ernestinum, they received care, and efforts were made to rehabilitate them through structured education, discipline, and engagement in manual labor.

The goal was to find ways to rehabilitate such children and integrate them into general society. Nevertheless, children with severe abnormalities were often institutionalized, and their care was combined with education and efforts towards socialization.64 Child psychiatry in the early twentieth century was thus closely connected with psychology and pedagogy. Already in the nineteenth century, it was apparent that the effective treatment and education of children with mental disabilities requires cooperation among physicians, educators, and psychologists. In the Czech Lands, these kinds of collaborative effort took the form of professional conferences, special schools, and specialized courses for teachers.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, child psychiatry underwent dramatic development. Though initially marginalized within the science of psychiatry, it evolved into a separate field that takes into account the specific features of the mental lives of children and adolescents. From the mid-nineteenth century, we can observe the beginnings of the emergence of forms of systemic care for “feebleminded” children. The first representatives of this field spurred the creation of dedicated institutions and the establishment of specialized conferences, thus creating a firm foundation for further developments in the field.

In the Czech Lands of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, considerable progress was made in the field of child psychiatry. The establishment of the Ernestinum was an especially notable milestone, as was the work of Karel Herfort. Despite limited resources and social prejudice, which often hampered the effective social integration of youths who were leaving the Ernestinum, this initiative laid foundations for modern approaches to the diagnostics and treatment of children with specific needs, approaches which remain relevant to this day. As revealed in the discussion above, the Ernestinum, an institute initially founded by a private association and only later supported by the state, played a pivotal role in this process. It was a leading institution in this field, and soon, others followed. A similar institution, dedicated to the care of “feebleminded” boys, was founded in Bohemia by the Provincial Council in 1910 in Hradec Králové. Later, similar institutes were founded in Opařany, with the transformation of an older institution dedicated to care for adults, in Hloubětín, at the initiative of the Association for the Care of the Feebleminded in the Czechoslovak Republic, and in Slatiňany, near Chrudim, with the creation of an institution which focused on providing care for children with severe mental handicaps.65

Conclusion

The case studies published by Karel Herfort show that the care children received in the Ernestinum led to the improvement of some skills. However, while the desired outcome was to prepare children to lead a fully independent life, few achieved this goal. A general review of the cases described by Herfort shows mixed results. In some areas, the children achieved partial success, for instance in basic work skills, reading, writing, counting, and core social skills. But we find no cases where the young adults who were leaving the Ernestinum were capable of independent life outside the institute. Many were able to engage in useful occupations within the institute. They worked as porters, gardeners, or assistants, doing undemanding manual work. Others became popular thanks to their joyful dispositions and the efforts made by the staff, who respected their limitations and helped them develop basic social skills. The staff, who were mostly nuns, also cared for and supervised the health of patients with more severe health conditions, such as epilepsy. The institute provided a safe environment. For instance, it offered a safe place to a woman who, due to deep naivety and poor orientation in space and time, often became the target of unwanted attention from random men and was generally susceptible to manipulation.

Nevertheless, the patients described in Herfort’s case studies experienced failures after leaving the institute and during their attempts to transition to independent life. They remained dependent on supervision and were incapable of more complex tasks or independent decisions. In some cases, one can identify disorders of the autistic spectrum, which therapeutic methods of that time were unable to address. One of the most important lessons is that, in the early twentieth century, there were no support programs to help people leaving institutional care integrate into society at large, and the Ernestinum itself could not provide any support in this regard. Furthermore, young people who were leaving the Ernestinum often encountered intolerance on the part of society. Social prejudice and the absence of support programs thus hampered the effective integration of former Ernestinum patients. This was an aspect of care for young people with mental disabilities that would only begin to be addressed in subsequent decades.

Moreover, the Czech discourse on so-called feeblemindedness at the time, while influenced by dominant German terminology, such as Schwachsinn and Minderwertigkeit, developed its own linguistic and conceptual nuances. Czech terms like slabomyslný, úchylný, and duševně vadný were often vague and encompassed a wide spectrum of mental and behavioral deviations. Despite this imprecision, the Czech approach was marked by a greater emphasis on individualization and educational optimism. This was particularly evident in the work of Karel Herfort, who strongly advocated the view that no child should ever be considered uneducable. The relationship between medicine and special education in the Czech context was largely complementary rather than competitive. Physicians and educators collaborated closely, with medicine providing diagnosis and care, while pedagogy focused on practical education and social development. This interdisciplinary cooperation, manifested in joint conferences and shared institutional practices, underscores the Czech effort to create a more humane and inclusive framework for children with mental disabilities, even though the societal structures of the time remained insufficient to support their full integration. This development demonstrates that the Czech approach to “feeblemindedness” was not merely a passive recipient of foreign theories but actively adapted and reshaped these ideas in accordance with domestic needs and values.

Archival Sources

Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv (ÖStA HHStA)

SB Auersperg XXVII-100-12. Auersperg, Familien (Herrschafts-) Archiv (Depot)

Národní archiv [Czech National Archives], Prague

Zemský výbor Praha 1874–1928

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Centralizing Custody and Curing by Chance: Early Austrian Madhouses under Medical Supervision and State Constraint, c. 1780–1830

Carlos Watzka

Sigmund Freud Private University, Vienna

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 Hungarian Historical Review Volume 14 Issue 4 (2025): 493-536 DOI 10.38145/2025.4.493

This article offers an overview of the early development of madhouses as an insti­tutional framework for the custody and treatment of mentally ill persons, from the initial phase of comprehensive governmental health politics in Austria (the peak of the Enlightenment movement in the region in the late eighteenth century) until 1830, when a second phase, which had begun in 1815 and which bore witness, again, to the establishment of asylums for people suffering from mental disorders, came to an end with the foundation of an asylum in the city of Hall in Tyrol. The article outlines the establishment of such institutions for the accommodation, detention, and, partially, treatment of people seen as insane in the Austrian Hereditary Lands as a political and societal attempt to react to a rising number of individuals who were perceived as suffering from serious mental problems but whose families and communities either did not feel obliged to provide care for them or were simply not capable of treating them anymore in their respective localities. The article points out, as has been noted in the secondary literature, that all early madhouses in Vienna, Linz, Graz, and Salzburg operated primarily as institutions for the internment of persons perceived as mentally ill and posing a threat to themselves and others. The physicians involved intended to implement therapeutical activities, but this was only rarely possible due to a lack of financial resources, accommodation space, and asylum staff.

Keywords: madhouse, psychiatry, Austria, Josephinism, early nineteenth century, social history

Introduction: The Scope and State of Research

In the discussion below, I offer an overview of the early institutional history of madness in Austria in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.1 Remarkably, one does not find, in the secondary literature, any real comprehensive or systematic accounts of the historical development of discourses and practices dealing with people deemed insane in Austria before 1900.2 Hence, this article presents a still provisional overview of the state of research regarding aspects fundamental to asocial-historical analysis of the issue. It focuses on the following questions: what type of institutions were there to provide care for those deemed mentally unfit? When and where were they established? What resources and treatments were used, in what manner, and with what outcomes?

Regarding the history of the mentally ill and the ways in which they were treated in even earlier periods, it should be noted here that peculiar discourses and practices had been present in Austria (and in most regions of Western and Central Europe) since the Middle Ages, with an increasing number of sources from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onwards,3 relating to academic as well as clerical and popular medicine.4

Nonetheless, within the Habsburg Monarchy, it was not until the last decades of the eighteenth century that social institutions were established with the specific public mandate to provide custody and/or care for people who were regarded as mentally ill and whose circumstances were perceived as a social problem. The appearance of the “madman”5 as a social role and prominent cultural figure was connected to broader sociocultural changes. Since the publication of the works of Michel Foucault, Erving Goffman, Klaus Dörner, and several other prominent representatives of “antipsychiatry” in the 1960s and 1970s,6 the historical research community, too, has devoted considerable attention to the topic of insanity. From the 1980s onwards, the history of the institutionalization of mental health care began to be written by professional historians who adopted clearly critical perspectives, inspired in part by insights from social and cultural history.7 They all identified an increase in political and social demands for the control of people suffering from mental disorders in early modern Europe. For the most part, this transformation directly affected not only the mad themselves, but also those in their immediate surroundings. This process was largely ambiguous and in many cases devastatingly negative in terms of both the quality of the life for patients in institutions and even from the quantitative perspective of their life expectancies.8 On the other hand, increasingly intense material and intellectual efforts were made to cure the mentally disturbed in this period, in part because of the influence of Enlightenment ideas concerning the curability of madness, which formed something of a widespread ideal and mindset among the middle and upper classes.9

The pace of this process varied across Europe, and it clearly depended in part on the regional tendencies in technological progress, urbanization, and industrialization.10 These processes led to an increasing number of individuals not living within the traditionally narrowly woven networks of family and neighborhood communities anymore. These communities, which of course should hardly be idealized, usually played important roles in addressing interpersonal conflicts, thus restricting the demand for permanent institutional accommodation mainly to cases of perceived need for intensive care or custody, which would have overstrained the resources of the local community.11

The time span under discussion in this article stretches from the late eighteenth century to 1830, the year in which the first phase of the institu­tionalization process in Austria came to a temporary end with the opening of an Irrenheilanstalt in the town of Hall in Tyrol. Later, from the 1850s and 1860s, several other projects were launched to create new spaces for a rapidly expanding “population” of inmates. The spatial scope was limited to the Austrian Hereditary Lands, which had a majority German-speaking population and a direct nexus to the Austrian core land. Therefore, neither the Bohemian nor the Polish crown lands, the Kingdom of Hungary, Vorderösterreich (Outer Austria), the Litoral, or Carniola are dealt with here. It is worth noting that the secondary literature on early psychiatry in the area under study here (roughly, the territory of modern-day Austria, though also including parts of South Tyrol and Lower Styria, and excluding Burgenland, which was part of Hungary until 1920–21) is quite heterogenous. Even in the case of Vienna, which was the imperial capital and the political, economic, and cultural center of the Habsburg Monarchy (and was considered the “vanguard of progress” in many fields and had the most comprehensive public infrastructure), until recently, no extensive or thorough scholarly studies have been published on the early stages of psychiatry.12 Until recently, very little had been written even on the “Narrenturm” (Tower of Fools), which was founded in 1784 and garnered enormous notoriety as an irritatingly noticeable symbol of the beginnings of psychiatry in Austria (it now houses the anatomical-pathological collection of the Naturhistorisches Museum of Vienna). The regrettably fragmented state of the secondary literature on the topic has now begun to change due to new, insightful publications. Above all, in 2023, Viennese physician and writer Daniel Vitecek published the first (!) comprehensive scholarly monograph on the medical and social history of the Narrenturm and the beginnings of psychiatry in Lower Austria, including the peculiar institution for mental patients regarded as incurable in Ybbs. Vitecek presents a vast array of valuable earlier findings, hitherto scattered in various remote contributions, and also several entirely new insights based upon sources analyzed from this perspective for the first time.13

Remarkably, from the perspective of the institutionalization of mental health care in the nineteenth century, Tyrol is the Austrian region that has been the most thoroughly studied, even though this process began in Tyrol later than in other regions of the monarchy. The research group dedicated to the social history of medicine and medical humanities at the University of Innsbruck has produced remarkable results in this field since the 1990s, with contributions by Elisabeth Dietrich-Daum, Maria Heidegger, Michaela Ralser, and others.14 Heidegger in particular has published numerous insightful contributions regarding Tyrolean psychiatry in the mid-nineteenth century from several perspectives. In addition to social and patient history, she has focused on gender history, the history of emotions, and body history.15 For Salzburg, the first historical analysis by Harald Waitzbauer was published in 1998, and recently, a further overview, examining additional archival sources, was authored by Theresa Lumetzberger. Both works deal with the period before the mid-nineteenth century, though the focus is on later periods, as is the case in Elisabeth Telsnig’s study on artistic work by psychiatric inmates in the region.16 For other parts of Austria, until now, there have been no studies comparable in extent or chronological scope on the early stages of psychiatry, neither for the more populous crownlands of Upper Austria and Styria nor for Carinthia.17 For Upper Austria, some research on the initial phases of housing for the mentally ill since the 1780s was done in 1970s and 1980s by Konrad Plass, Gustav Hoffmann, and others, but no additional studies have been undertaken.18 Regarding the history of psychiatry in Styria, particularly the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are moderately well-researched now, but for the period before the mid-nineteenth century, there is much research still to be done. Overviews were given by Carlos Watzka and Norbert Weiss.19 In the case of Carinthia, the nineteenth-century history of the asylum founded in Klagenfurt in 1822 has largely been overlooked, despite some efforts by Paul Posch, Karl Frick, Lisa Künstl, and Thomas Platz.20

Figure 1. Early public madhouses within the area of contemporary Austria, 1780 to 1830
(Sketch map by C. Watzka, based on a template available at Wikimedia commons)

In the discussion below, I examine the development of public institutional structures for the custodial care and, eventually, the cure of the mad in the Austrian Hereditary Lands between the 1780s and 1830, drawing mainly on the secondary literature and printed sources.21 I pay attention particularly to fundamental aspects, such as buildings, staff, patients, and their living conditions, as well as the therapies eventually provided for them. The broader context of the cultural and social history of the Habsburg Monarchy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including its politics regarding poor relief and the healthcare system in general, is dealt with only selectively here, when connections of processes in these wider fields with concrete institutional developments in mental health care are highlighted.22

The Tower of Fools (Narrenturm) in Vienna

Compared to Western Europe, from the perspective of early efforts to establish a specialized structure for the internment and, eventually, treatment of the mad, Austria was a latecomer, even though the opposite is sometimes asserted in older literature and on some popular websites even today. The beginnings of larger, specialized structures for the accommodation of the insane date back to the fifteenth century in Spain and to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Italy, France, England, Holland, Germany, and Poland.23 In Austria, however, until about the mid-eighteenth century the task of providing custody for insane persons was largely left to a non-centralized structure of small multifunctional hospitals, often owned and run by communities or religious orders. Additionally, some state-run poorhouses also began to accommodate mad people as an additional task. This situation, albeit probably advantageous at least for some of the affected individuals, was seen as insufficient by the central authorities, especially in light of permanently growing public demands. Yet it was not until the government of Emperor Joseph II from 1780 to 1790 that any large-scale establishment of state institutions for public health care in general was implemented, and this then took place in the context of a systematic effort to strengthen the agency of the central government and, in turn, to cut back the political and social power of the Catholic Church and other stakeholders, such as the already quite insignificant traditional, regionally based nobility. With such regulations, which bore strong affinities with other projects for progress, Joseph II and the enlightened official nobility around him put into practice the concept of “medizinische Policey,” or medical police, developed by academic physicians of the time. Johann Peter Frank (1745–1821) of south German origin, the most prominent and productive of them,24 was recruited as a medical professor first for Austrian Lombardy in 1785 and then took over the Viennese general hospital in 1795. The foundation of the latter in 1784 was the work of his Vienna-born predecessor, Joseph von Quarin (1733–1814), who had served as personal physician to Maria Theresia and Joseph II.25

In 1781, Joseph II focused his attention on efforts to provide relief and healthcare for the poor. He himself authored the so-called “Directiv-Regeln,” the rules for the future establishment of hospitals and care institutions. These rules formulated the principle of internal separation between the various kinds of needy persons, the impact of which lasts until today. The intention was to draw a clear distinction between children (foundlings and orphans) and adults and to provide separate accommodations for them. Among the latter, it distinguished between pregnant women in need of maternal care, people who were “merely” poor but healthy, poor individuals with acute but treatable diseases, and people who were poor and chronically ill or disabled.26 This categorization, which reflects the emphasis among the so-called enlightened on classifications (particularly of matters regarded as problematic, as discussed by Foucault),27 was enriched by a peculiar further category of ill persons, namely those not regarded as suitable for treatment within the general hospital. This classification applied to individuals who for some reason “cause damage or disgust” and included Wahnwitzige (maniacs), people purportedly suffering from venereal diseases, and those with visible signs of illness or damage to the body (Krebse or cancers). All of them, according to the emperor himself, had “to be removed from general society and from the eyes of humans.”28

The Viennese Narrenturm, which was established in 1784 as the first purpose-built madhouse in the Habsburg Monarchy, was part of these coordinated efforts to create a state-run public health care system for the urban population of the capital, which had roughly doubled over the course of only 80 years, from more than 120,000 around 1700 to approximately 250,000 in the 1780s.29 The Narrenturm was situated within the area of the new general hospital in the Alsergrund suburb (today the ninth district of Vienna). For the building itself, the former Großarmenhaus (Large Poorhouse) was used. This edifice had been established in the 1690s and had been home to more than 1,600 inmates in 1781, when it was dissolved.30

The foundation of the Viennese Narrenturm or Tollhaus was a personal project for Emperor Joseph II, who spent a considerable amount of money from his personal funds and dedicated significant efforts to its creation, thus centralizing the detention of the mad hitherto accommodated within various smaller structures. In quantitative terms, the wing for mad inmates at the large civic hospital in the Saint Marx suburb of Vienna (today the third district of Vienna) was probably the largest source for transfers to the newly erected Narrenturm. The hospital had offered space for 300 to 500 persons altogether in the mid- and late-eighteenth century, including space dedicated for the internment (and eventually treatment) of about 30 people perceived as mad. In reality, it accommodated up to nearly 80 persons of allegedly “corrupted” mind in the 1760s and 1770s, as Sarah Pichlkastern has shown in her extensive research on the Viennese Civic Hospital and its various sites.31

Prior to its opening, other inmates who came to be lodged in the Narrenturm had been accommodated in institutions such as civic poorhouses scattered across the city and its surroundings. These institutions held more than 2,600 inmates already in 1766, of whom at that date 128 (ca. 5 percent) were considered “Hinfallende, Habnärrische, Blödsinnige” (epileptics, half-fools, or stupid), as Daniel Vitecek’s research has demonstrated, drawing on the Wienerische Diarium, a journal which reported on the issue. Patients were also transferred to the Narrenturm from the Viennese Spanish Hospital (also called the Trinity Hospital) in the Alsergrund suburb and the monastic hospital of the Barmherzige Brüder (Order of Saint John of God) in the Leopoldstadt suburb (today the second district of Vienna),32 which mainly treated somatic diseases but also offered accommodation and treatment for the mentally ill in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.33 That hospital was left open even during the Josephinist cloister dissolutions because of its acknowledged practical value, but with regards to accommodation for the mentally ill, it was limited by imperial order to the task of providing care exclusively for insane clergymen.34

By founding the Narrenturm, Joseph II and his government avowedly intended to ameliorate the living conditions and, particularly, chances of recovery for the insane. Thus, this initiative resembled the founding of the general hospital in Vienna, which was established to improve the circumstances and living conditions of those suffering from some bodily illness. Nonetheless, the emperor himself was not free of stereotypical and prejudiced convictions regarding illness and insanity, even by contemporary standards. In particular, he obviously held the traditional belief that, were a pregnant woman to behold something disgusting or horrifying, this might have dire consequences for the health and sanity of her unborn child. “Objects or humans” that were deemed a horrific sight were therefore to be isolated and kept away from the public eye as a matter of public health.35

Unfortunately, the sources reveal only broad outlines concerning Joseph II’s personal ideas on the needs and legitimate claims of the mentally ill. But the issue of providing accommodation and care for the insane was clearly a target of the emperors’ pronounced habit of thriftiness, as he personally gave the order, still in 1784, to provide “only a diet of four Kreuzer per day” “for the mad,” instead of the seven Kreuzer given as the amount that would cover the average expenses for “ordinary” patients at the Viennese General Hospital.36 Perhaps the belief in a general “lack of judgement” among the mad, which was quite common among in enlightened thought, contributed to the emperor’s conclusion that it would not “pay off” to provide expenses beyond the sheer minimum for madmen, as differences between higher or lower quality of food, clothing, or furniture would not be noticed by them, and shortcomings would not be have the same negative health effects as they would for “normal” persons. Vitecek summarizes the sobering effect of Joseph’s II personal interest in designing the first Austrian mental asylum: “the scarcest equipment and scarcest staff” were allocated to the Narrenturm, compared with the other institutions founded by the emperor.37

This, of course, had dire consequences for the inmates of the new institution. In contrast to at least some of the hospitals where these people had been accommodated before, in the Narrenturm, all approximately 250 inmates were indiscriminately prohibited from taking walks outside the building. Only two small and dark inner courtyards were set aside for this purpose (see Fig. 2). This order was kept even after the death of Joseph II in 1790. Eventually, during the principalship of Johann Peter Frank, in 1796, two small gardens, surrounded by a high wall, were installed, offering the inmates somewhat better conditions and an opportunity to enjoy sunlight and fresh air.38

Figure 2. The Narrenturm in Vienna: the blueprint of the basement and ground floor,
displaying the cell structure, the building for the staff, the courtyards, and pipes for heating and the removal of waste.
(Copper etching, Vienna 1783. Image in the public domain)

There obviously was a strong drive behind the Josephinian government to segregate the insane from a society believed to be in a state of becoming increasingly healthy (including with reference to its mental wellbeing) due to a virtually all-embracing medical police and the broad healthcare measures launched in the monarchy. Notions concerning the possible transmissibility of madness by infection, even if they were not widely believed, may have played a certain role in this practice of exclusion as well. Thus, in enlightened late eighteenth-century Vienna, official approaches to care for the insane clearly put the idea of custodialism at the forefront, and therapeutical pursuits were a distant second. This was expressed openly by the inscription on the Narrenturm’s entrance since about 1790, by order of Leopold II, the successor to Joseph II: Custodiae mente captorum, or “to provide custody of the insane.”39 In this regard, the Austrian version of enlightened biopolitics appears to have been a quite defensive and conservative one, even during the reign of Joseph II, which was allegedly the peak of progressive tendencies.40

Figure 3. Depiction of the Narrenturm in Vienna, Painting by Franz Gerasch
(mid-nineteenth century)
(CC – Belvedere Online Collection:
https://sammlung.belvedere.at/objects/12044/das-alte-irrenhaus-in-wien-narrenturm-kaiser-josephguge)

The menacing exterior of the Viennese madhouse (see Fig. 3), which was described as “a terrible prison far from all human society” as early as 1793 by an anonymous visitor, corresponds with its distinctive inner structure. In other words, this interior is a seemingly endless circular sequencing of small cells, which were used to isolate inmates from one another, though they tended to confuse everybody residing in the building (as one can experience even today by taking a personal visit). This structure was designed at the order of Joseph II to contain either only one or two detainees per cell, who, from the outset, were to be locked up in their cells with the use of iron manacles and chains if considered dangerous, as most of them were.41 The cells on each floor form an outer ring structure, easily supervised by the wardens from the circular gangway making up the inner ring of the building, connected by the central wing, accessible only to the staff (see Fig. 2). Cells were furnished in a manner designed to reduce the need for direct interaction between staff and inmates to a minimum, with slightly angled floors to allow excrement to run on its own into a drainage system. A central heating system was used to avoid any need for stoves or furnaces near the cells. Iron rings were installed in the walls to make it possible to bind inmates with chains. Heavy double doors with locks were used, along with barred windows, to prevent attempts to escape.42 Quite clearly, at least for the decision-makers involved in the founding of this asylum, there must have been a considerable fear of the people who were put into custody in the edifice.

Yet, the whole building, which was erected in less than two years (1783–1784), seems to represent, in addition to its practical function as a madhouse, some of Joseph II’s very distinctive ideas. The emperor hired acknowledged master builder Josef Gerl (1734–1789) to implement his vision. Even apart from the somewhat daring assumption that the installation of a lightning rod on the roof of the building (it is perhaps worth noting that the Narrenturm was one of the first buildings in Vienna to receive one) had been part of a secretly planned device for experimental electrotherapy,43 the basic architectural features of the madhouse seemed peculiar to most observers from its foundation. This included the overall tower-like shape, which inspired its non-official name, “Tower of Fools” (instead of house). This designation quickly spread in popular discourse, as did the nickname the “Emperor’s Guglhupf,” which was attached to it later. The outstanding 2023 monograph on the Narrenturm by Daniel Vitecek underpins the assertion that this and other stylistic features of the building were designed by Emperor Joseph II himself. According to the funeral speech given by his personal physician Giovanni Alessandro Brambilla (1728–1800), it was Joseph II who had drafted the drawing.44

This simple fact suggests that the distinctive shape of the Narrenturm did not serve medical purposes but rather was an aesthetic means of serving a political goal. The edifice provided an impressive landmark of imperial power and perhaps also of purposefully created mysteriousness.45 The tiny octagonal tower, originally situated at the center of the tower’s roof (but missing today) probably symbolized imperial perfection in this case, too, reflecting a tradition that can be traced back to Roman and medieval rulers, who used the existing interpretative pattern of equating the number of eight with the sacred, in particular in architecture.46

Figure 4. The old Lazareth located in Alsergrund suburb,
the second site of the Viennese madhouse since 1792.
(Detail from copper plate—view of Vienna by Folbert van Alten-Allen, 1686; CC)

Already around 1790, the Narrenturm proved insufficient to meet the growing demand for accommodations for severely mentally disturbed persons in Vienna and Lower Austria. The authorities reacted to this situation by refurbishing the former Viennese lazaretto near the general hospital (see Fig. 4) for this purpose, a measure already proposed by Quarin in 1784. This institution opened in 1792 as an asylum for about 150 so-called “ruhige Irre” or “peaceful insane” (a behavioral classification meaning patients who were considered men­tally ill but not violent, not disruptive, and not considered dangerous), ending the provisional accommodation of “completely harmless fools” in other public buildings in the Alsergrund district, a practice that was followed from at least 1786 due to the lack of space in the Narrenturm.47 Irrespective of the administrative connections of both madhouses (the Narrentum and the lazaretto) to the general hospital, apart from a primary physician who served the needs of the patients part-time in the 1780s (in addition to providing treatment for patients in the general hospital), the medical staff consisted of only one surgeon and his assistant. According to an instruction to the staff dating from 1789, one male and two female keepers (Wärter) were assigned to each floor of the building, which formed a department. This document also refers to so-called “helpers” (Gehilfen), but it does not specify their numbers.48

Late eighteenth-century observers did not form a favorable judgement of the accommodations within the building either. Apart from the fact that the so-called “raving mad” were chained to the wall within their respective “containers” (Behälter), the “peaceful insane” also had to cope with inappropriately low beds and spartan furniture (a bed, a table, and two chairs) in their small, dimly lit cells. Furthermore, the central heating system, praised as innovative when the edifice was built, could never be used properly, as it did not warm up the cells due to a technical failure which could not later be corrected, even though staff tried to heat the spaces with ovens positioned in the circular, connecting corridors. The lack of a separate water supply in the building aggravated problems, especially sanitary hygiene, because the water needed had to be carried there from the general hospital. The wish to spare costs for this probably led to stronger limitations in the use of water as would have been in place otherwise. This was particularly disadvantageous, because the second largest-scale technical innovation in the construction of the Narrenturm, the waterless system for the removal of excrement from the patients’ cells, also could not be used after the 1790s, probably due to the gradual obstruction of the pipes by excrement, thus causing an intolerable stink in the building. These conditions are detailed in the testimony of Johann Peter Frank, who ordered that these outlets be bricked up and replaced with the simple, time-tested tool of the chamber pot, which in turn made the regular manual removal of excrement from each individual cell a necessity.49

Therapeutic measures of any kind were considered desirable in principle, but in practice, due to the small number of medically educated staff, they were only rarely used. Hence, within the asylum, the mode of cure overall was very simple and mostly consisted of simple diet, as a contemporary observer reported in 1797.50 We cannot rule out the possibility that, even at this initial state, so-called moral treatments were put to some use, along with psychological cures, such as the contemporary innovations highly praised by progressive early psychiatrists and doctors for the mentally ill, above all Pinel, Tuke, and Chiarugi in France, England, and Italy.51 However, there is no systematic documentation indicating the use of such approaches before the 1790s.

The situation began to change around 1800, when a traveler acknowledged the compassion and concern apparent in the psychological treatment of inmates conducted by primary physician Franz Nord (1761–1822), who had succeeded Johann Peter Frank as primary physician for the madhouse in 1795 and since 1805 had also served as director of the general hospital.52 His medical work with the mentally ill was praised by others, but difficulties in the organization of the finances of the institution and/or his habit of “openly confessing the defects of the institution on several occasions and demanding adequate remedies”53 led to his dismissal in 1811.54

In contrast to the use of psychological remedies, which probably remained rare, somatic treatments, which followed the tradition of humoral pathology, apparently were quite frequently used from the outset (i.e., from 1784), as they were seen as more time efficient. As for pharmacological therapies, detailed descriptions from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries remain scattered. However, as a travel report published in 1802 reveals, two traditional purgantia—Cantharidin, contained in Spanischen Fliegen (Spanish flies, Cantharis vesicatoria and Brechweinstein (Antimonium tartaricum, tartar emetic) – were used by Nord in a relatively cautious manner as an externally applied irritant. Orally administered drugs were not mentioned by name in the relevant report but rather were described as “strengthening and stimulating substances.”55

As a general result of the centralization process of the Viennese health care system, survival and recovery rates did not increase as had been hoped and expected. On the contrary, mortality rates increased due to the more rapid transmission of infectious diseases among the now densely populated wards in hospitals. This seems to have been the case in the Narrenturm as well, as least to some extent. The earliest records on the numbers of inmates, admissions, releases, and deaths56 cannot be aggregated to offer a fully consistent and clear picture, as some of the data are lacking, but Vitecek nonetheless persuasively demonstrates in his study that during the first period of about 16 and a half years from April 1784 to August 1801, there were 3,201 registered admissions to and 2,719 departures from the asylum altogether. With 729 fatalities among the inmates, the total mortality rate for this period of 16.5 years comes to 23 percent or 27 percent (depending on the mode of calculation). Annual mortality, of course, was much lower, but it still varied between approximately five and ten percent. This was quite high in contemporary terms as well. The same statistical data prove that, despite the stereotypical opinion that admission to the asylum equaled long-term interment (perhaps until the patient’s death), a considerable number of the inmates, slightly more than 100 on average, were actually dismissed each year. For the total time span between 1784 and 1801, this amounts to 54 percent of those admitted and 63 percent of those who were released. Transfers to other departments of the general hospital came to about ten percent annually. Therefore, though the ratio of inmates regarded as cured remains unknown, even during this first stage, when many patients in the Narrenturm had to endure inhumane living conditions aggravated by the absence of proper therapeutic treatments, more than half of the admitted patients survived the institution and were discharged sooner or later. Among the early patients, there were more men than women (ca. 60 percent versus 40 percent). Furthermore, the figures also reveal that male inmates had lower chances of survival than female inmates.57

Within the former lazaretto, which was repurposed in 1792 to serve as a department for “peaceful fools” and particularly convalescent patients, overall living conditions were better than within the Narrenturm. Yet it was not until 1803 that a physician and a surgeon were hired exclusively for this department. They were responsible for providing care for both incurable and curable patients, with emphasis on the latter as the preferred future target group. From 1807 onwards, the political authorities expected newly admitted individuals suspected of madness to be transferred first to the lazaretto for observation and not immediately to the Narrenturm, at least in the more worrisome cases. Yet, as Vitecek points out, the differentiating criterion for admission was not supposed curability but the perceived difficulty of handling their behaviors. Inmates were thus divided into groups based on the classification of raging and impure on the one hand and the classification of peaceful and clean on the other.58

These distinctions were useful in the disciplinary functioning of the asylum, an aspect on which the contemporary reports on the Narrenturm only rarely touch. However, the physician Michael Wagner, in an appendix to his early translation of Philip Pinel’s psychiatric manual published in 1801, lists “fasting, straitjacket, straps, handcuffs and leg irons” as “usual means for taming, applied when circumstances demand.”59 In turn, useful occupations, ranging from unskilled work to qualified handicrafts and even office activities, were used for therapeutic and disciplinary purposes in cases of patients who were regarded as suitable subjects for this approach, as reported on several occasions.60

Salzburg’s Early Madhouse and the Sister Institutions of
the Viennese Narrenturm in Linz and Graz, ca. 1780–1800

Salzburg was the site of first asylum on the territory of present-day Austria, though it was an independent ecclesiastical principality within the Holy Roman Empire until its dissolution in 1806. Moreover, the establishment of a hospital for the Sinnlose (senseless) and Tollsinnige (mad-sensed) in 1783 appears to have been more nominal than functional, as suggested by the sources cited in the first more detailed historiographic account of Irrenwesen im Herzogthum Salzburg, by Ignaz Harrer (1826–1905), a former mayor of Salzburg.61 Remarkably, this madhouse was also founded as a consequence of personal initiative. This is indicative of the emerging and intensifying societal interest in the relationship between reason and madness among the social elites in Austria and Southern Germany during the last decades of the eighteenth century.62

Augustin Georg Paulus (1695–1777), a surgeon and administrator of several municipal institutions in Salzburg63 (including the Bruderhaus hospital), bequeathed the majority of his estate to charitable causes. Following his death, his widow allocated the substantial sum of 4,000 florins specifically to the improvement of accommodations for the furiosi (the raving mad). Until that point, such persons had been confined in Kötterl (lockable wooden hutches) beneath Saint Sebastian Bruderhaus on Linzergasse (in the suburb am Stein), a situation increasingly deemed inadequate. Archbishop Hieronymus Colloredo (1732–1812), a leading proponent of the Catholic Enlightenment in the region in the late eighteenth century,64 took a personal interest in the matter. He contributed an additional 4,000 florins, solicited further donations, and ultimately initiated the construction of a new facility on the grounds of the existing Bruderhaus. The aim was to provide a space for those “degraded to the level of animals by their defect of reason,” where, through appropriate care, they might recover their mental faculties.65 Echoing the model set by Joseph II for Vienna, Colloredo decreed in 1800 that the new institution should admit only individuals who, due to their raving behavior, would pose a threat “to the lives and property of the other human beings in society.”66

However, the following year, Dr. Michael Steinhauser von Treuberg (1754–1814), city physician and chief medical officer at the Johannis hospital in the suburb of Mülln,67 submitted a report that, in my assessment, clearly demonstrates that little had changed in practice since 1783. The few mentally ill individuals housed at the Bruderhaus site were, in fact, still kept in the old wooden hutches, while the new building had partly collapsed and the part that remained intact was being used as a school. Steinhauser concluded that “the structure was not yet at all in a condition to serve a medical function,” and the facility would only be able to serve as the desperately needed institution of a madhouse are repairs had been done and the school that was functioning in the building had been relocated.68 Thus, with regard to the Narrenhaus in Salzburg, although there were indeed plans to found a new asylum and a new edifice was built in the late eighteenth century, the new institution did not become practically operational until 1801. In this case, too, economic difficulties, which got increasingly pressing over the course of the 1790s, were also a decisive factor.69

Figure 5. The building of the former Prunerstift in Linz,
partially used as madhouse between 1788 and 1867. Recent view, photography
taken by Volker Weihbold, Oberösterreichische Nachrichten (by courtesy).

As had been true in Lower Austria, the establishment of madhouses in Upper Austria and Styria was initiated by Joseph II, but developments in these provinces followed somewhat different trajectories. In Linz, the capital of Upper Austria, the new madhouse was established by imperial decree in 1788. A large charitable institution originally founded in the 1730s was repurposed. This institution had been founded thanks to a generous testamentary donation of more than 175,000 florins by Johann Adam Prunner (1681–1734; often spelled Pruner), a merchant and long-serving mayor of Linz. His endowment had been intended to provide shelter and sustenance for no fewer than 81 impoverished townspeople. Situated just to the east of the city walls near the Danube River (the address today is Fabrikstraße 10, Linz), this charitable foundation enjoyed a favorable location, though it was considered somewhat unhealthy due to the foul odors from a nearby rivulet and surrounding industrial activities. By 1785, however, it had come to the attention of state authorities as a problematic institution, largely because inflation had created a growing financial deficit. Following a personal visit to Linz in 1786, Joseph II ordered a complete restructuring: the orphans and elderly residents without serious health problems were to be relocated to private homes, and the building itself was to be repurposed as a state-run facility comprising a general hospital, a madhouse, a labor and delivery department, and a foundling asylum. The plan for a general state hospital in Linz was not pursued, however, in part because the two existing hospitals operated by religious orders were considered sufficient. Likewise, the idea of a foundling asylum was soon abandoned, and foundlings instead were placed in foster care outside the city. 70

Ultimately, the only facilities that were permanently established at the so-called Prunerstift (see Fig. 5) were to provide housing for the mentally ill and unmarried pregnant women. When the madhouse began operations in 1788, it occupied only one side wing of the building and housed eight individuals, two men and six women. These individuals had previously been provisionally accommodated at the city’s lazaretto, which had served this function since 1768.71 Plans, however, referred to a total of 24 cells, located within both rear side wings of the building, to be used for the confinement of the mentally ill, with one wing designated for male patients and the other for females. The existing cells, which, in accordance with Pruner’s will, were slightly larger than those of the Capuchins, were fitted with wooden grids for that purpose. While this construction created significant noise disturbances for the inmates, it was considered advantageous for heating purposes, since the cells themselves were not equipped with stoves but instead were warmed only indirectly by heating in the corridors during winter.

The madhouse in Linz, along with the adjoining delivery house, was managed by an administrator of the foundation. As in Vienna and other early asylums in Austria before 1800, no physicians were permanently employed to treat mentally ill inmates at the outset. Medical visits were arranged when perceived as needed, primarily for somatic conditions. Two attendants, one man and one woman, were responsible for daily provisions, nursing care, and supervision of the inmates. Patients considered dangerous were chained to their beds, and, as was true of the Narrenturm in Vienna, visitors frequently remarked on their deplorable conditions, which included oppressive darkness, loud noises, and particularly the stench caused by excrement on the floors, which could not be adequately removed. These issues likely affected not only the inmates but also the staff who lived in the institute and thus was exposed to the same conditions.72 Nonetheless, no substantial structural improvements appear to have been made in the first decade after 1800, and the number of inmates probably remained close to the originally planned capacity of 24 until at least 1815.

The madhouse in Graz was similarly founded due to the personal intervention of Joseph II. In 1781, the emperor had instructed the regional government in Graz to conduct a survey of existing charitable institutions and foundations across Inner Austria,73 including all hospitals, workhouses, and the large poorhouse already operating in Graz.74 In March 1784, Joseph II personally visited in the Styrian capital for five days, during which time he is credibly reported to have toured “all public institutions” in the city. At the end of his visit, he issued an imperial Handbillet to Governor Johann Franz Anton von Khevenhüller (1737–1797) outlining significant structural changes, including the repurposing of the existing poorhouse in the Gries suburb for a future medical hospital, which was also to accommodate mentally ill individuals. This mirrored the approach already taken in Vienna.

Figure 6. The former Capuchin cloister in Graz, which was used as madhouse
between 1788 and 1873. Recent view, image from Google maps (3-D-view, 18.04.2025),
edited by C. Watzka. The rather small, muddled complex near the northeastern city gate
is displayed from the eastern direction in bird’s eye view.

However, preparations for such large-scale changes took time. During another visit to Graz in June 1786, Joseph II noted the vacancy of the former manor of the Upper Styrian cloister of Saint Lambrecht in Graz and reconsidered his plans. He designated that vast building, located at the edge of the city in the Paulustorgasse, to house the new General Hospital and another, smaller building across from it (the former Capuchin cloister in Graz, also vacant at the time) as the new madhouse. After some further delays, the madhouse in Graz (Paulustorgasse 11, see Fig. 6) officially began operations in December 1788.75

The first inmates were transferred to the madhouse from the various provisional locations around the city.76 By the end of 1789, the number of inmates had risen to 26, and by 1790, it reached 31. Initially, the institution was intended to house only “raving, demented, and furious” individuals. “Peaceful” people suffering from milder mental disorders were to be placed in the general hospital. An accommodation fee of 10 Kreuzers was fixed for the third-class patients, which included ordinary and poor persons. This fee was to be paid either by the patients or by charitable foundations responsible for their care. Interestingly, no distinction was made between fees for the general hospital and those for the madhouse. Yet from the outset, the entire General Hospital, to which the madhouse was organizationally linked, faced severe financial difficulties, which intensified in the 1790s. Meanwhile, the number of inmates increased steeply, from 31 in 1790 to 65 in 1795 and 78 by 1800.77

As in all other Austrian madhouses of the period, no specialized medical staff was employed to treat the mentally ill in Graz. This is revealed, for instance, by the official 1796 publication by Philipp Graf Welsperg von Primör und Raitenau (1735–1806), governor of Inner Austria at the time. This publication provided an overview of the structure of the poor relief institutions in Graz.78 The staff of the madhouse included the director and the administrator of the general hospital, who oversaw the institution, as well as the surgeon and assistant from the general hospital. Together, they were scheduled to supervise the inmates in pairs, alternating daily, and to monitor the work of the two “sub-supervisors” employed at the madhouse. The primary focus of these visits was to oversee the inmate’s “food, laundry, cleanliness,” and “custody,” especially to ensure protection against harm, whether self-inflicted or inflicted on others by the inmates. Doubtless, this concern for safety was one of the main reasons for the policy of isolating each inmate in a separate room or chamber.

Illness was largely understood in terms of somatic illnesses that could affect the insane. In such cases, the protocol was to transfer the patient to a “sickroom” within the madhouse or to the nearby general hospital, with medical assistance provided as needed. However, there was no mention of specific psychiatric or moral treatment. The focus was on preventing “mistreatment of any kind.” The accommodations provided for the inmates and the ways in which they were handled depended on the severity of their diseases and the dangerousness of their behaviors, according to Welsperg’s description. Those deemed dangerous were put in chains, while the raving were separated from the more harmless inmates. More peaceful patients were allowed “to walk in a locked courtyard or garden,” with men and women alternating. Inmates were encouraged to engage in “moderate occupations,” but only with the consent of the attending physician and only if accommodated free of charge. This clearly shows that this was intended more as a means to contribute to the costs of their stay than as a genuinely therapeutic measure.

Remarkably, the regulation explicitly excluded the admission of individuals from rural areas for whom nobody (neither family nor any community, authority, or fund) would cover the costs of their stay.79 One year later, in 1797, Graz, unlike other major cities in the Hereditary Lands, was occupied for the first time by French troops during the Napoleonic wars. While no major acts of violence were reported, the military occupation placed significant additional financial strain on the city and the region.80

Austrian Madhouses during the Napoleonic Crisis of
the Habsburg Monarchy: Survival under Precarious Conditions

In Austrian proto-psychiatry, even the modest plans to improve the living conditions of mentally ill inmates largely came to a standstill from the mid-1790s, and no significant initiatives in this direction were taken for more than two decades. The broader political and economic context was profoundly discouraging to any reform efforts, both ideologically and financially. As early as 1789, the Austrian Monarchy became deeply embroiled in a fierce struggle against the spread of democratic and liberal ideas, which had gained momentum across Europe in the wake of the French Revolution. From 1792 onward, this ideological confrontation escalated into military conflict. Particularly since the Third Coalition War of 1805, the Habsburg Monarchy faced existential threats and found itself teetering on the brink of collapse due to the immense loss of life and resources incurred in the wars against Napoleonic France, a country that, in the eyes of many Central Europeans, had shifted from a beacon of human progress to a source of imperialist aggression and repression.81

During the military campaigns of 1805 and 1809, even the Austrian capital was occupied by French troops, and this turmoil inevitably impacted the Viennese madhouse, too. At the time, both sites, the Narrenturm and the lazaretto, together housed 430 to 440 patients annually. These two years witnessed particularly high annual mortality rates: 17–18 percent in 1805 and 1809, compared to a relatively lower range of 9–12 percent in 1806, 1807, and 1808.82 The defeat of the Habsburg Monarchy in 1809 contributed dramatically to the temporary collapse of Austrian state finances in 1811, further paralyzing any institutional improvements. Even the seemingly modest proposal to appoint a single physician with full-time responsibility, on the basis of a salaried employment contract, for the Viennese madhouse was implemented only after the end of the Napoleonic wars.

Dr. Ignaz Eisl (born 1764, died after 1845), who served as primary physician at the madhouse from 1811 to 1826, in 1817 was formally relieved of all other responsibilities within the General Hospital of Vienna by decree of the Imperial Court Chancellery.83 He was then exclusively tasked with the treatment of the insane in both the Narrenturm and the lazaretto. On that occasion, a written directive originally prepared in 1814 was reissued by state authorities. This directive emphasized the two main duties of the primary physician: to prevent mistreatment of the inmates and to implement appropriate precautions to protect others from potential harm by the patients. Significantly, this document confirmed that a differentiated accommodation scheme was already in effect to determine whether a new patient should be admitted to the Narrenturm or the lazaretto, and to which ward specifically. The classification criteria included perceived “dangerousness, noisiness, uncleanliness, incurability, and inclination to escape.” Notably, the concept of moral treatment, which developed in late eighteenth-century England and France,84 is explicitly referenced in these instructions under the term “moralische Arzney.” The use of the then “modern” straitjacket as a means of physical restraint is also documented.85

As for the medical personnel, it is worth noting that Bruno Goergen (1777–1842), who later gained recognition as the director of the first large private asylum in Vienna (from 1819 onward), also served as a primary physician responsible for the mentally ill at the General Hospital from 1805 to approximately 1814.86 The exact division of responsibilities between Nord, Eisl, and Goergen during this period remains unclear, but it is likely that each was primarily assigned to one of the two facilities for a given timespan.

Even less is known about actual staffing and other fundamental organizational aspects at the smaller madhouses in Linz, Graz, and Salzburg during that period from about 1800 to 1815. This historiographic silence is in itself revealing, suggesting that few changes occurred, or at least no changes that were later regarded as positive or memorable by learned observers.

One notable exception is the case of Salzburg, where Ignaz Harrer (1826–1905),
later mayor of the city and an active reformer of its health and welfare institutions, took a keen interest in the development of a modern “Irrenanstalt” (insane asylum) in the 1860s.87 Drawing on archival sources, Harrer reconstructed the prolonged and difficult early history of psychiatric care in Salzburg, which started in the late 1770s. As mentioned above, until 1801, individuals suffering from severe mental illnesses had still been confined under harsh conditions in hutches attached to Bruderhaus hospital. Despite earlier intentions, a separate madhouse had not yet been established. In 1804, city physician Dr. Steinhauser, responsible for the treatment of the inmates, submitted a new report on the issue, indicating that large parts of the asylum had remained in a dilapidated state and were unfit for patient accommodation. Meanwhile, “only raving or severely unclean human beings” were held in the aforementioned huts, where prolonged stay was deemed both “unsanitary and unhealthy” by the rapporteur. Particularly illuminating are Steinhauser’s further remarks on the day-to-day operations of this rudimentary institution:

The staff appointed for all the sick [of the Bruderhaus hospital] consists of two old and weak women, who care for the patients and cook for them from the weekly [monetary] contributions made. These miserable contributions hardly suffice for the women to obtain the necessary food; the house provides only lodging, firewood, lighting,

and straw [for the inmates]. Thus, nothing remains—not even for a shirt or some medicine—and each visit by the physician or these women entails begging and personal danger. Particularly instructed staff and a fund supporting the physician’s psychological [sic] intentions, regarding the pharmacy, kitchen, and living rooms, but also contact, labor, walking, cold and warms baths etc., should be introduced.88

Among the therapeutic measures Steinhauser deemed appropriate were “serious coercive treatment, isolation, suitable diet, and adequate psychological use of the lucida intervalla [periods of mental clarity].” But he warned against excessive use of purgative medicines, which, in his view, either killed people or rendered them permanently “unreasonable.” Notably, Steinhauser admitted to having applied various traditional remedies to treat insanity, inherited from ancient and early modern medicine,89 during the “early stages of his medical career,” such as “opium, camphor, measures to cause suppurating wounds, starvation and thirst,” but (unsurprisingly to us today) without sufficient, lasting success.90 These brief but pointed remarks reflect a clear shift towards the then emerging approach of moral treatment and a distancing from older, somatic-based approaches that dominated early modern cures.

Sobering commentary from the principal medical council, addressed to the government of the Salzburg principality, explicitly emphasized the dangers of the “current miserable and disordered situation of the institution for the insane, which brings the unfortunate [inmates] closer to the edges of ruin.” Yet, at the same time, it cautioned that no substantial remedy for this situation could be formulated until more financial resources were found to expand the institution’s potential.91 In the years that followed, local authorities attempted to address the problem by initiating a complete relocation of the institution and soliciting funds from private benefactors, a process that began in 1807 but took more than a decade to complete.92

Wider geopolitical turmoil and economic instability (warfare and economic hardships all over Europe) contributed to this prolonged stagnation. Salzburg, in particular, suffered severely. The city was occupied and plundered three times between 1800 and 1809 by French and Bavarian forces. The Erzstift (ecclesiastical principality) of Salzburg was dissolved in 1803, and the region became a part of the Habsburg Monarchy in 1805, only to be annexed by Napoleonic Bavaria in 1810 following Austria’s military defeat. Only after the final defeat of Napoleonic France in 1815 and a treaty concluded between Austria and Bavaria in 1816 did the country and the city of Salzburg become definitively incorporated into the Austrian Monarchy.93

Even less information appears to have survived regarding the two Josephinian madhouses in Graz and Linz during the “silent” period between approximately 1800 and 1815. However, some basic data on the institutions’ operations were preserved, mainly in nineteenth-century publications. For Graz, in his account of the 100-year anniversary of the city’s general hospital published in 1889, the Styrian medical historian Viktor Fossel provided annual counts of the numbers of patients, beginning in 1789. According to him, the asylum housed between about 60 and 95 inmates per year in the early nineteenth century, with a peak between 1801 and 1804. Numbers dropped to 70–80 for the period from 1805 to 1812, reaching a low point of 58 in 1814.94 While the reasons for this decline are not explicitly documented, it was likely due to a lack of resources rather than a decrease in the number of mentally ill individuals in the region.

In Linz, the Prunerstift was reportedly capable of accommodating 32 inmates at the time, as described in Benedikt Pillwein’s 1824 publication on the city and its institutions. Yet in 1800, only 14 patients were housed there, and by 1824, the number had increased only modestly to 22. These relatively low numbers were attributed to the requirement that non-local communities in Upper Austria had to provide for their own mentally ill.95

Similarly, the total number of inmates at the Viennese madhouse (comprising the Narrenturm and lazaretto) declined rapidly from around 500–570 in the first years of the nineteenth century to approximately 430–460 between 1804 and 1811. In the final years of the Napoleonic wars, the numbers rose only slightly, reaching about 480–520. A closer look at Viennese statistical data, particularly the numbers of annual admissions and dismissals, reveals that this decline resulted from a combination of moderately reduced admissions, increased discharges, and higher mortality rates.96

Institutionalized Custody and Care for the Insane
during the Early Austrian Biedermeier Period

Shortly after the peace treaties concluded by the Congress of Vienna, Austrian governmental authorities once again devoted attention to the problems of inadequate facilities and overcrowding within Austrian madhouses. In 1818, a decision was made by the Hofkanzlei (Court Chancery) which had a lasting impact on the structure of funding for the whole of the poor relief and health care system in the Habsburg Monarchy for at least half a century, as the relevant institutions were now differentiated in two categories, one relating to organizations dealing with “cases, in which the overall wealth of the state is endangered by diseases” and another for institutions with purposes deemed less urgent. The institutions that belonged to the first class were then regarded as “state institutions” and were entitled to receive subsidies from the imperial treasury. In addition to the lazarettos and other facilities for the prevention of epidemics, they consisted of hospitals for venereal diseases, homes for foundlings, and madhouses. The institutions that belonged to the second class, which included medical, maternity, and other kinds of hospitals and hospices, were considered “local,” and funding was to be provided by the communities that made use of them.97

On the regional level, in Lower Austria, efforts to ameliorate the living conditions of the insane within the existing institutions quickly led to the creation of an auxiliary branch designed to house patients deemed both relatively peaceful and incurable outside of Vienna. In 1816, first the empty former monastery of Mauerbach (20 kilometers west of Vienna) was briefly converted into an insane asylum, accommodating 30 to 40 chronically mentally ill individuals. However, this initiative proved short-lived. Just one year later, the government repurposed former cavalry barracks in Ybbs, considerably farther from Vienna but offering much larger capacity, to house 300–400 mentally ill individuals. These patients were accommodated alongside other dependent persons in need of care. Significantly, the institution in Ybbs operated without any structured therapeutic regime, reflecting the concept of a Pflegeanstalt (nursing institution), where the focus was not on medical treatment but on containment. This custodial approach drew criticism from the first physician formally appointed to care for the mentally ill there in the 1840s, Carl Spurzheim (1810–1872). Spurzheim lamented that the institution had functioned as little more than a mere “depot” for the insane until the start of his tenure there.98 Despite the establishment of the Ybbs facility, concern about the quantitative and qualitative inadequacy of psychiatric infrastructure in Vienna persisted.

 

As early as the 1820s, public and professional voices began calling for a new, larger, purpose-built mental asylum in Vienna. In 1822, the administration of the Vienna General Hospital acquired the extensive vacant grounds at Bründlfeld, situated near the hospital, for this very purpose. Architectural plans were soon designed for a vast and impressive Irrenheilanstalt (institution for curing the insane; see Fig. 7).

Nevertheless, the lack of funds or, rather, the lack of will among the political elites to invest considerable sums for such a purpose led to the collapse of this project in 1829 before any construction work had started.99 Following this failed initiative, no major public project to expand psychiatric institutions in Vienna was launched for nearly two decades, despite the urgent and growing demand within the city’s health care system.

Some small expansion of the infrastructure for psychiatric treatments in Vienna occurred in 1828, when a further space within the General Hospital (a hall large enough to accommodate approximately 20 individuals) was de­signated as an “observation room” for newly admitted patients suspected of mentally illness.100 The overall annual number of patients housed within the various facilities collectively known as the Lower Austrian Irrenanstalt in Vienna rose to slightly above 600 in 1816 and 1817, thus surpassing the figures recorded around 1800. This was followed by a modest decline to approximately 540–570 in 1818–1820, but patient numbers rose again throughout the 1820s to about 620–630 in the early part of the decade and to sums between about 700 to nearly 800 individuals by its second half.101

The existing sources provide little evidence, however, of any improvements to conditions from the perspectives of accommodation, care, and treatment during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. On the contrary, new therapeutic measures were introduced (particularly in the “observation ward”) that probably exacerbated patient suffering. The German psychiatrist Wilhelm Horn (1803–1871), who visited Vienna in 1828, described the frequent use of the so-called Cox’s swing, a mechanical device that rapidly rotated the restrained patient with the intention of inducing nausea and vomiting. Some contemporary psychiatrists viewed this reaction as both disciplinary and curative. Horn also observed the regular use of the “Mundzwinge,” a gag-like apparatus invented by Johann Autenrieth (1772–1835), which forcibly prevented patients from crying out.

Within the “regular” departments of the Viennese asylum, the Narrenturm and the lazaretto, therapeutic practices may have been somewhat less brutal by comparison. However, the physical infrastructure of these institutions was widely regarded insufficient. Franz Güntner (1790–1882), who served as primary physician of the madhouse from 1826 to 1831 and succeeded Eisl in this position, still relied heavily on traditional remedies rooted in humoral pathology. Many of these medicines were designed to provoke strong bodily reactions, such as disgust, vomiting, diarrhea, and pain. Examples included the use of the “Autenrith’sche Salbe,” a skin-irritating ointment promoted by the aforementioned German physician, and the well-known tartar emetic. As a sedative drug, valerian (Valeriana officinalis) was commonly administered.102

In Graz as in Vienna, the available accommodation space within the mad­house had become grossly insufficient by the early nineteenth century. Around 1820, overcrowding had once again led to disastrous living conditions. The former Capuchin cloister, which contained only 26 cells and a few additional rooms for staff and infrastructural needs, was forced to house approximately 90 detainees over the course of one year, a situation reminiscent of the immediate post-1800 period. By 1825, the annual number of inmates had surged even to 130. Even if the number of individuals present at any one time was considerably lower, the chronic lack of space necessitated that each small former monastic cell had to be shared by two or three mentally ill persons. This practice, especially in the case of agitated and raving individuals, could only be maintained through the constant use of mechanical restraints. In 1829, after more than a decade of planning, the next phase of the asylum’s expansion was finally realized. The institution was extended with the purchase of the so-called Röchenzaun’sche Häuser adjacent to it, which then were used in part for the asylum and partly for the Gebärhaus (birthing house) of the city. The urgency of this expansion is evidenced by the immediate and steep rise in the number of patients, which leapt to 168 already in 1830.103

No physician was employed to care specifically for the inmates of the madhouse after 1815; instead, medical responsibility remained a secondary entrusted to doctors of the general hospital in Graz. Even when the Styrian government formally petitioned, in the late 1820s, for the creation of a salaried post for a chief asylum physician (suggesting an annual wage of 200 florins, a sum markedly lower than that of a grammar school teacher, which came to 450–800 florins at the time), the request was denied by the authorities in Vienna. The position was ultimately filled without remuneration when Dr. Albert Ritter von Kalchberg (ca. 1800 – after 1877), the son of the wealthy noble landowner, historian, and politician Johann Ritter von Kalchberg (1765–1827), agreed to serve without salary in exchange for free accommodation within the asylum. It was not until 1832 that a financial compensation was approved for the asylum’s primary physician.104

Living conditions at the asylum in Graz remained harsh throughout these decades, as was openly acknowledged in early 1840s by Dr. Wenzel Streinz (1792–1876), who was then chief health officer of the whole of Styria. In his brochure Die Versorgungsanstalten zu Grätz, Streinz critically observed that the madhouse served primarily as a custodial facility rather than a therapeutic one:

According to its original and still current regulations, that institution serves the care of insane, raving, and lunatic persons, for whom accommodation in such a specifically designated facility appears necessary to render the outbreaks of their mental confusions harmless to them and others. Therefore, the madhouse in Grätz [sic] remains nothing more than a place of detention and nursing for such individuals, the vast majority of whom remained unhealed and spend [the rest of] their lifetime there—largely because they were already in a chronic and therefore incurable stage of illness. Nevertheless, occasionally single recoveries do occur, though they must be considered fortunate accidents, since all the conditions required for a systematically arranged curative institute for the mentally ill are still lacking.105

Remarkably, this was the same Dr. Streinz who had earlier served as chief health officer in Upper Austria and had become director of the Linz asylum after it was designated a state institution in 1824.106 Streinz advocated for the purchase of a new, more suitable facility for the mentally ill in Linz soon after his appointment. However, these efforts were ultimately thwarted due to financial concerns. In the absence of a new site, the existing building was modified to function, to the extent possible, as a proper asylum. According to Anton Knörlein (1802–1872), who became director of the institute in 1837, the reforms introduced by Streinz in the 1820s included the removal of the old, foul-smelling wooden flooring, the provision of proper equipment and laundry, and the abandonment of the use of chains as restraints. By the early 1830s, the numbers of inmates at the asylum in Linz also had risen considerably. Knörlein recorded 48 inmates at the end of 1833 and a total of 86 patients treated during 1834. Yet in Upper Austria the request for the appointment of a salaried physician was likewise rejected at the time by the Viennese authorities. A paid position for a doctor of medicine at the institute was only established in 1837, after the then-responsible physician Georg Meisinger (1799–1874) had resigned from his unpaid post.107

In Salzburg, the development of a dedicated asylum, understood as an institution with its own administrative structure and qualified, specialized appointed staff, had been envisioned since around 1780, but no concrete steps were taken in this direction until 1815, as previously noted. This situation only changed after a devastating fire in 1818 destroyed large parts of the old suburb am Stein, which had been home to 1,154 persons, the Bruderhaus included.108 The hospitalized insane survived the blaze thanks to the efforts of compassionate townspeople, but those among them who were agitated had to be tied to trees outside the city gates for two days and two nights, until the so-called Kammerlohrhaus (a small former correctional house) in the suburb of Mülln was hastily prepared to receive them.109 Contemporary physicians soon judged this new facility inadequate for its use as an asylum for the mentally ill. It had only 17 small, dimly lit chambers, and its staff was considered insufficient. In 1830, three attendants were responsible for all care duties, and a lack of space restricted the number of inmates to around 20, which was less than needed. In contrast to the asylums in Vienna, Linz, and Graz, the Salzburg madhouse was never designated a state institute during the Vormärz period. Rather, it remained a locally administered institution until its closure in 1852.110 An 1850 account still described it, despite the presence of medical support, as “a mere institute for detention.”111

As mentioned in the introduction to this article, two additional asylums were founded between 1815 and 1830. In Klagenfurt, a former prison was provisionally adapted in 1822 to accommodate up to 40 mentally ill individuals.112 More significantly, in 1830, a new asylum was established in Hall in Tyrol, housed in a former monastery. Unlike its predecessors, this institution was explicitly designed as an Irrenheilanstalt, i.e., a facility for curing the mad. Thus, it was the first such functioning institution in the Habsburg Monarchy. The subsequent development of this asylum, along with the development of the other asylums after 1830, lies beyond the scope of the present study.113

Conclusion

The article has demonstrated, in broad consensus with the secondary literature on the subject that in the Austrian context, the Enlightenment era brought with it a declared intention to treat individuals suffering from serious mental disorders humanely and, as far as possible, to cure them through the methods of emerging psychiatry. However, neither sufficient political and social attention nor, more crucially, an ethical commitment to invest adequate financial resources accompanied this ambition. The nascent Josephinist welfare system of late eighteenth-century Austria was generally shaped by a paternalistic if not outright autocratic ethos. In this framework, the primary goal of early public madhouses was clearly the preservation of public order and not to nurture or further the wellbeing of the inmates. Even if such institutions were, with a few possible exceptions, not purposefully used for the interment of politically inconvenient but mentally sound individuals, their core function remained custodial, not therapeutic.114

Providing truly adequate living conditions for the mentally ill would have required more spacious and appropriate housing and also a significantly larger and better-trained staff. This, in turn, would have incurred considerably higher costs, resources that neither the imperial court nor the central or regional authorities nor even local communities were willing to provide, especially not for the vast majority of inmates, who hailed from ordinary or poor family backgrounds. In contrast, wealthier individuals and those of higher social status who suffered from mental illness often had access to private care at home or could be accommodated in one of Vienna’s private asylums.

Apart from the inmates themselves and, in some cases, their family members, the staff of these early mental asylums were those most consistently confronted with the harsh realities of contemporary asylum life. Physicians, surgeons, supervisors, administrators, and occasionally priests, as the most educated and highest-ranking professional groups involved, often gave sobering descriptions of the conditions in the asylums and the treatments sometimes used. Many of these accounts adopted an explicitly critical stance towards the institutions in which their authors worked. In contrast, the experience and perspectives of lower-ranking staff, such as keepers, servants, nurses, and so-called “old women,” are only rarely documented and thus remain largely inaccessible to historians.

Personal testimonies of inmates themselves from the early phase of institutional psychiatry are similarly scarce. Where they exist, these rare accounts are of particular value for research into the history of psychiatric patients.115 However, a deeper exploration of these sources, from the perspective of patient history, lies beyond the scope of this overview, as does any look into the early stages of academic psychiatry in Austria, which, at least from the perspective of publications, was limited in quantity and, with a few exceptions, also of limited importance for the further development of the discipline,116 at least until the 1830s, when Ernst von Feuchtersleben (1806–1849) published Zur Diätetik der Seele. The focus here instead has been on fundamental institutional and structural aspects of the emergence of psychiatry in Austria, especially with regard to the early developments and limitations of public asylums during the late Enlightenment and Vormärz periods.

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The Journalistic Activity of Rosika Schwimmer
from the 1890s until her Death in a Transnational Perspective

Dóra Fedeles-Czeferner

ELTE Research Centre for the Humanities

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 14 Issue 3 (2025): 459-490 DOI 10.38145/2025.3.459

This paper examines the journalistic career of Rosika Schwimmer, a prominent Hungarian feminist and pacifist, from the 1890s until her death. It situates her work within the broader historical context of transnational feminist and pacifist movements of the early twentieth century. Schwimmer’s career was shaped by a wide network of contacts in the international progressive women’s movement. Her activism enhanced her visibility as a public intellectual, but her controversial pacifist stance later led to political isolation and negatively affected her professional opportunities after emigrating to the United States. Throughout her life, Schwimmer used the press as a tool for activism and as a platform for self-promotion. The paper also explores her qualifications, skill sets, and the range of publications she contributed to, which included liberal newspapers and feminist journals.

The paper also provides insights into the challenges women faced in journalism in the first half of the 20th century, contrasting two articles from 1912 and 1914 that present opposing views on women’s prospects in the field. Schwimmer’s career began with translations, which served as a gateway to international journalism. She published in Hungarian, German, and later English-language journals, often on topics like women’s rights, peace advocacy, and international cooperation. Her controversial and eccentric personality led to conflicts with colleagues, which also shaped her professional image and legacy. The paper concludes with a case study of her articles from 1919–1920, which illustrate the fusion of her political and journalistic identities.

Key words: Rosika Schwimmer, journalism, feminist, pacifist, women’s rights, activism, transnational, Hungary, international press.

Introduction

In October 1912, A Nő és a Társadalom (Woman and Society), a journal published in Budapest between 1907 and 1913 as the first official press organ of the Budapest-based Feministák Egyesülete (Feminists’ Association, or FE) and Nőtisztviselők Országos Egyesülete (National Association of Female Clerks, or NOE), included a short article in its Szemle (Review) column. According to the author of this article, who wished to remain anonymous, “the new phenomenon in the occupation of female labor is the employment of women in the field of political journalism.” The author could not, of course, undertake an analysis of the general trends in this phenomenon in such a short article, but (s)he did provide a number of examples in support of his/her arguments. In addition to journalists from Budapest, the article shares the names of female reporters living and working in Timişoara (or Temesvár by its Hungarian name; today a city in Romania).1 Because the text emphasized the importance of Timişoara, we might suppose that it was written by the leader of the FE’s Political Committee, Rosika Schwimmer, who had grown up in the city and was obviously familiar with local conditions. By that time, she had emerged as an internationally well-known progressive feminist activist and pacifist. She would have been a logical choice as author, as she was the editor-in-chief of A Nő és a Társadalom, which by the early 1910s had a nationwide circulation in Hungary. The article also mentions the women editors of a political daily in the southern regions of Hungary and in Transylvania. Furthermore, it lists a few women from the membership and supporter circles of NOE and FE who were employed by various daily newspapers published in Budapest. At the end of the text (which is only 15 lines long), the author expresses his/her wish that “we do hope that professional women journalists will replace the sports journalists who are damaging through the amateurism and imitation of male writers.”2

This was not the only time that A Nő és a Társadalom devoted attention to women journalists. However, after a series of articles was published in this organ encouraging women’s empowerment in journalism, reporting, and editing, A Nő. Feminista Folyóirat (Woman. A Feminist Journal), which was the successor to A Nő és a Társadalom, began to deal with the issue. In one article, it reported on journalism courses that were organized for women in Budapest. The author of the article is identified merely as “A woman reporter.” The relatively detailed and long article approaches the issue from several different aspects and argues that “Hungarian journalism is closed to women’s contributions.” After discussing the reasons for the “male domination” of newspaper editorial offices, the author explains that, “with a few exceptions […] the situation and living conditions of women writers and journalists are dire […], their position is uncertain, and their success is sometimes dependent on petty considerations.” The author therefore warns women who are about to embark on a career in journalism not to do so. She claims that even if they succeed, they will almost certainly fall victim to the exploitative attitudes of male editors.3

While the article published in 1912 is entirely optimistic about women’s prospects in journalism, the article which appeared two years later is negative. This can be interpreted in several ways. The interpretations can be linked to the structural characteristics of the two journals and the editorial motivations behind their publication. Like many of the short news items in the two periodicals, which share many similarities in terms of structure, content, and style, the earlier text seems to have been intended to inspire the readers with propagandistic elements. The author of the 1912 text clearly wanted to convey the message that women were able to succeed in careers in journalism and editing that had previously been almost entirely dominated by men. The 1914 article, in contrast, is a longer, analytical piece. In its structure and length, it is a problematic article that uses every possible argument and rhetorical device to dissuade women from pursuing careers in journalism. Of course, the author of the article may have been several reasons for writing this. However, given her identity (a “female reporter” who chose to keep her name secret), she may also have sought to discourage other women from becoming journalists, as they might have been competition for her.4

The reality is roughly halfway between the claims made in the two articles. As early as the 1880s, a few Hungarian women were able to make a living from journalism and editorial work.5 At the turn of the century, Rosika Schwimmer was one of these women. She made an unparalleled contribution as a journalist, author, and periodical editor in Hungary, western Europe, and the United States in the first half of the twentieth century.6

This paper explores the key turning points in Rosika Schwimmer’s journalistic career, situating her work within the broader historical context of early twentieth-century transnational feminist and pacifist movements. I argue that from the outset of her career, Schwimmer benefited from substantial support from prominent figures in the international progressive women’s movement, particularly in Austria, the Netherlands, and the United States. This network of allies significantly shaped her trajectory as both a journalist and editor. Drawing on the growing historiography of transnational feminism and the role of the press in women’s activism,7 I show how Schwimmer’s involvement in the women’s and peace movements intersected with and influenced her professional path. During the formative years of her career, her activist engagement enhanced her visibility and credibility as a public intellectual. However, this relationship became ambivalent following her emigration to the United States, where increasing political isolation, amplified by her controversial pacifist stance, negatively affected her professional opportunities and public reception.

Throughout her life, Schwimmer sought to utilize the press not only as a tool for activism but also as a platform to construct and maintain her own public persona. Her self-branding strategies can be understood in light of recent literature on women’s authorship and media,8 which underscores how women navigated public discourses through journalism. At the same time, her strong and eccentric personality led to frequent conflicts with colleagues and collaborators, and these tensions shaped her professional image and legacy. This paper also investigates Schwimmer’s qualifications and the specific skill sets that made her well-suited to a journalistic career. What kind of formal or informal training did she have? What editorial or rhetorical techniques characterized her work? I map the types of publications she contributed to, which ranged from liberal newspapers to feminist journals, and I examine the scope and reach of these press outlets within and beyond Hungary. In terms of content and genre, Schwimmer wrote primarily on issues related to women’s rights, peace advocacy, and international cooperation. Her work spanned various formats, including editorials, news reports, and opinion pieces, reflecting a deep commitment to both activism and professional journalism.

The article concludes with a close reading of a three-part series of articles published by Schwimmer at the turn of 1919–1920. I interpret this series as a form of ars poetica for her activism, or in other words as a reflection on her political ethos and the challenges of sustaining idealism amid disillusionment and exile. This case study illustrates the fusion of her political and journalistic identities and sheds light on the intellectual and emotional foundations of her lifelong struggle for peace and women’s emancipation.

Sources

In addition to meticulously preserving her correspondence and documents related to her personal life and political activism, Schwimmer also archived her journalistic writings, organizing them as a distinct section within the Rosika Schwimmer Papers in the New York Public Library Manuscripts and Archives Division.9 Her extensive documentation practices, driven by a tendency toward graphomania, a growing compulsion for systematization, and a persistent need for self-vindication following her unsuccessful diplomatic mission in Switzerland as envoy of the Hungarian government in 1918, are especially evident in Series 2 of the collection, which comprises twelve boxes. In this section, carefully sorted and catalogued published and unpublished articles can be found from the period between 1896 to 1948. These articles are supplemented with notes and research materials, partly produced by Schwimmer herself. Her secretaries also included the different references/reactions Schwimmer received to her articles between 1899 and 1940. Regarding the correspondence she carried on with the editors of the journals she published in, however, only a small fraction can be found here.10 The archivists who organized the collection have integrated the vast majority of these materials into the 465 boxes of Schwimmer’s general correspondence (Series 1).11

The six publication indexes, which have also been preserved in this series of the collection, contain Schwimmer’s articles published in Hungarian, German, English, and French, as well as references to her early writings. The indexes include her writings published in Hungary, further regions of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, Europe, and the United States of America in chronological order.12 Schwimmer’s short articles are also included here, the majority of which had been published anonymously or under pseudonyms. These were submitted to the review sections of various Austrian and German journals, and most of them appeared in the early 1900s. A tremendous amount of manuscripts can also be found here, partly with notes made by editors and proofreaders.

Schwimmer’s Journalistic Career within the Context of Women’s
Intellectual Work

It is essential to begin with an examination of Rosika Schwimmer’s journalistic career within the broader context of women’s intellectual labor at the fin-de-siècle. After this, I briefly analyze the particular situation of Schwimmer and her family background. The turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century was a period marked by profound social and cultural transformations in East Central Europe.13 It can be characterized as one of the most turbulent periods in the economic, social, and cultural development of the region, including Austria and Hungary. Vienna was at the forefront of the adaptation of modern Western culture within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but Budapest also played an important role.14

The innovations of the industrial revolutions, the development of transport, communications, and the press, as well as the gradual expansion of institutional education greatly expanded the world of traditionally closed communities. Distances that had seemed unbridgeable in previous decades were shortened, and the flow of ideas and information accelerated rapidly, alongside the flow of products. However, it was not until the establishment of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in 1867 that Hungary began to experience a major economic boom. The social and economic changes, the growing “surplus of women,” and the increasing number of widows even before World War I forced more and more women into the world of paid work. This was exacerbated by the economic crisis of 1873 and the subsequent recurrent recessions. Marriage was therefore no longer a “solution” for all women in society, as the example of Rosika Schwimmer also illustrates.15

The increased participation of women in the labor market began in the late 1880s, i.e. around the time of Schwimmer’s birth. In 1900, more than a quarter of women (27.6 percent) were already working to earn an income in Hungary, with a higher proportion (36.1 percent) in the capital. The general trend was for girls to start working at a very young age, but the majority of them stopped working after they got married. In 1910, 70 percent of working women were unmarried.

After the turn of the century, the structural transformation of the economy in the Dual Monarchy led to the feminization of certain professions. In many cases, this led to the reduction of the prestige these professions had enjoyed.16 Until World War I and in many respects even in the interwar period, a large part of public opinion, still dominated by men, considered women unfit to do work requiring serious concentration. Nevertheless, even before 1914, the number of women employed in certain intellectual jobs in agriculture, industry, and the service sector had begun to increase gradually.17 Importantly, however, a significant proportion of women did not “rush” into the world of labor of their own free will, but in response to overwhelming pressures. The postponement of marriage compelled women to support themselves financially. Over time, these multifaceted social transformations contributed to a growing recognition that the role of a wife could be reconciled with participation in the paid labor market.18

The Budapest-born and, by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, internationally renowned Rosika Schwimmer was a women’s rights and peace movement activist and also editor-in-chief and author for the first Hungarian feminist journal, A Nő és a Társadalom. She was born into a middle-class Jewish family as the oldest of three children. After her father’s bankruptcy, the family had to leave Budapest. From the age of six, Schwimmer grew up in parts of Transylvania and also in the cities of Timişoara in the region known as Banat and Subotica in the region known as Vojvodina. She moved back to Budapest in the middle of the 1890s and lived there until 1920. She attended primary school in Budapest and Transylvania. For a while, she was educated in a convent school that she later criticized harshly, and she graduated from a public school for girls. She also enrolled in a special school for commerce. She became proficient in several languages aside from Hungarian: German, English, and French, and she was able to communicate in Dutch, Italian, Swedish, and Norwegian. In the capital, she worked as a governess and later as a female clerk, meaning she became well aware of the troubles faced by working women.19

Schwimmer’s journalistic activity has to be examined within the context of women’s paid work for several reasons. First, she could not rely on her impoverished father for financial support, and she thus had to support herself from a relatively young age. From the sources on Schwimmer’s income and expenditures, it is clear that she could not or did not want to rely on her husband Béla Bédy’s support during their comparatively brief marriage. Bédy was also a journalist, but their marriage only lasted from 1911 until 1913. Thus, Schwimmer needed money, which may explain why, in addition to progressive, feminist journals, she also published in the organs of social democratic women’s organizations and even in several fashion magazines. Schwimmer needed the money she earned from journalism throughout her entire life, including the decades she spent in emigration in the United States. Even a few weeks before her death, she noted among her medical records that “it would be much more useful if I wrote my article [instead of these notes on the state of my health]. Everyone reads articles, but no one will read these…”20

Schwimmer did not remain, however, at the level of the average female journalist. By the eve of World War I, she had become a celebrity about whom the world’s leading newspapers and journals published. This popularity did not change from the period of her isolation beginning in the 1920s. And even though she became persona non grata in certain groups of the women’s and peace movement during the last two decades of her life, stories about her still frequently appeared in the papers, and she gave interviews regularly.

Influences, Challenges, and Rewards: How Schwimmer’s Relation
to her Journalistic Profession Altered over the Years

How did Rosika Schwimmer’s family background, her childhood in southern Hungary, and her involvement in both the Hungarian and international women’s and peace movements shape her development as a journalist? To what extent did her determined, passionate, yet markedly egocentric and at times confrontative personality facilitate or obstruct her professional advancement? I consider additional aspects that require further exploration in order fully to understand the intersections between her personal history, activism, and journalistic career. Schwimmer graduated from a state school for girls. After her graduation, she enrolled in a special trade school. From an early age, her parents and teachers recognized her talent for languages and writing. This talent proved invaluable in her later career. Within the family, they spoke not only Hungarian but also German, and she learned French at school. This likely explains her ability to master English and a few other languages as an adult. At around 16, she already had ambitious career plans, envisioning herself as a journalist, which was rather unusual in contemporary Timişoara. Her maternal uncle, Lipót/Leopold Katscher, who made a living as a writer and journalist, certainly served as an inspiration in this respect.21

Schwimmer had no qualifications of the type that would have predisposed her to a career as a journalist. At that time, however, this was not a problem, as very few female journalists had any qualifications in this field. Schwimmer’s ars poetica as a journalist may have been influenced, later, by the work of her husband, the aforementioned journalist Béla Bédy, but we cannot be sure of this, as their marriage lasted only two years. When Schwimmer began to build her career as a journalist and activist in the early 1900s, her first mentor was her uncle. In addition to his valuable professional and practical advice, he provided her with ongoing financial support and publication opportunities in Hungarian and foreign (German-language) periodicals.22 As Katscher was also the head of Magántisztviselők Országos Szövetsége (National Association of Private Officials, Budapest, 1893–?) at the time, he presumably influenced Schwimmer’s future activism and political agency.

Within the frames of FE, Schwimmer was responsible for the associations’ international relations, from which it continued to benefit even after Schwimmer left Hungary permanently in 1920. Until her emigration in 1920, she was also responsible for monitoring the international women’s movement press and promoting the achievements of the FE and the NOE in the official organs of women’s associations in Hungary and abroad.23 The development of Schwimmer’s career as a journalist went hand in hand with the gradual broadening of the FE’s scope of activities. The 1905 working program of FE merits consideration here, as the objectives of the association were primarily related to women as individuals existing and functioning within families, rather than to women as separate entities.24 This strategy was certainly adopted by the FE leadership in the hope of reaching more supporters in different layers of the society. According to the minutes of the board meetings, the number of FE members, and thus the number of subscribers to A Nő és a Társadalom and subsequently A Nő. Feminista Folyóirat, increased from 319 to 5,312 between 1906 and 1918, and the association gained more and more press coverage in Budapest and the rest of the country.25 The number of FE members, however, decreased to around 500 in the interwar period, a tendency which continued during and after World War II. At the same time, the number of people who followed FE’s official organ declined dramatically. A Nő. Feminista Folyóirat finally ceased publication in 1928.26

At the time of FE’s foundation in 1904, Schwimmer, who was barely 30 years old, was increasingly strategic in her efforts to build her international career. Partly as a result of this, by 1905, she was publishing in several Austrian, German, Swiss, and Western European journals. Related her lecture tours first in Western and Eastern Europe (after 1907 yearly) and then in North America (1914–1915, 1916), she gradually became a widely published journalist, writer, and popular speaker. She also became an encouraging role model for a growing number of young middle-class women. Her persuasiveness and speaking style won the sympathy of large audiences. A form of celebrity culture began to coalesce around her, illustrated by the many “fan letters” addressed to her, which offer testimonies to the personal admiration she inspired among her contemporaries.27 However, her commitment to her ideals, her eccentric personality, and her impulsiveness made daily life increasingly difficult for her and got her embroiled in professional and private debates and irreconcilable conflicts.28

As a result of her writing and journalistic activities in Hungary and abroad, as well as her lecture tours in Europe and the United States, Schwimmer built up a wide network of contacts, corresponding and collaborating with a wide range of women’s rights and peace activists, politicians, church leaders, intellectuals, and artists. She benefited greatly from these contacts throughout her life. She became increasingly isolated after going into emigration, however, and also came into conflict with her former coworkers at various journals. She never regained her role in feminist and pacifist organizations in the United States, although she continued to write, publish, and hold public speeches and lectures. Even in the last weeks of her life, she remained active writing articles.

From a Town in Southern Hungary to the Top of the Journalistic Profession: Schwimmer Path towards a Career as a Professional Journalist

Rosika Schwimmer started her career not by publishing articles but by doing translations. This work laid the foundation for her knowledge of and interest in the international world of ideas. In the early 1900s, she translated several works on the women’s emancipation movement from German into Hungarian. Among her first translations were articles published by Leopold Katscher in the German periodical Ethische Kultur: Monatsblatt für ethisch-soziale Neugestaltung in 1896–1897.29 From the late 1890s onwards, she began to build her journalistic career intensively. She sent her first contribution to a well-established Budapest periodical, Budapesti Hírlap (Budapest News), in April 1898. The editor, however, refused to publish her article for the following reasons:

The article submitted bears the character of a woman so impressed by her reading that a man […] cannot be judged from it. The essay itself, regardless of its author, is superficial and breezy, and […] lacks thoughtfulness and substance. I would have liked to have said something kinder and more positive.30

Schwimmer’s first articles in Hungarian finally appeared, with the support of Leopold Katscher, in Magántisztviselők Lapja (Journal of Private Officials), the official organ of Magántisztviselők Országos Szövetsége.31 The issues addressed in these articles can be reconstructed from letters written by Katscher, which are part of the Rosika Schwimmer Papers. Schwimmer usually reported on the activities and general board meetings of NOE and the exploitation of working women.32 She soon began to publish in several Hungarian journals, including Huszadik Század (Twentieth Century), Független Magyarország (Independent Hungary), Nemzeti Nőnevelés (National Education of Woman), Az Újság (The News), and the aforementioned Budapesti Hírlap.

At the same time, she also began to send articles to German and Austrian periodicals. She first posted an article for the Berlin monthly journal Die Frau in August 1901,33 but it was rejected for publication. The first stage of her international journalistic endeavors was the Austrian bourgeois women’s movement journal Frauenleben, which was published out of Vienna between 1894 and 1901 and which was edited by Austrian women’s movement activist Helene Littmann.34 Frauenleben published a submission by Schwimmer a mere month after her rejection by Die Frau. Its readership included members of women’s associations outside the Monarchy, as indicated by a letter by Aletta Jacobs to Schwimmer in 1902.35 In the following years, Schwimmer published articles in several German and Austrian journals (they were mostly women’s periodicals that focused on the women’s movement), including the following: Die Zeit, Wiener Mode, Arbeiterinnen-Zeitung, Neues Frauenleben, Illustrierte Frauen-Rundschau, Etische Kultur: Monatsblatt für ethisch-soziale Neugestaltung, and Dokumente des Fortschritts.36 The titles of these papers reveal two things. First, Schwimmer did not publish exclusively in the journals of progressive, bourgeois-liberal women’s associations, since the Arbeiterinnen-Zeitung, to which she sent articles relatively frequently for a few years, was the most important official organ of the Austrian social democratic women’s movement. Second, alongside the various periodicals that focused on the women’s movement, Schwimmer also published in women’s magazines and even in fashion magazines and newspapers.37

Schwimmer reported on the activities and achievements of women’s associations in Hungary, at first exclusively in German periodicals. After 1902, the aforementioned Aletta Jacobs helped her translate her articles into English and publish them in western and northern European journals.38 Schwimmer did not speak any English until the mid-1900s. This lack of knowledge of English had not been a major problem, since Schwimmer had corresponded almost exclusively with German, Austrian, French, and Swiss activists. Jacobs was the only exception, but she spoke German relatively well.39 After this point, however, Schwimmer began to correspond with Carrie Chapman Catt, founding president of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, which was established in Berlin in 1904 and then renamed the International Alliance of Women in 1926. This correspondence was only possible in English. Because of their inadequate knowledge of English, Schwimmer, internationally renowned progressive women’s rights and peace activist Vilma Glücklich, and a few other FE members hired a native English-speaking tutor to give them evening classes several times a week in the association room of FE and NOE.40 Schwimmer’s talent for foreign languages enabled her to master English within a short period of time, to the extent that within a few years, she was able to convey her ideas eloquently in what was for her a fourth language after Hungarian, German, and French.

One salient feature of Schwimmer’s personality was her apparently constant yearning for conflict. There are numerous signs of this in her journalistic oeuvre. In her correspondence, one finds regular traces of her conflicts with periodical editors from Hungary and other countries, of which I briefly outline one typical case below. Schwimmer published articles in Neues Frauenleben (Vienna, 1902–1918), the successor to the periodical Frauenleben, from the moment it was launched. She had a good collegial relationship with Auguste Fickert (1855, Vienna–1910, Maria Enzersdorf, Austria), editor of the periodical and a leading figure of the Austrian progressive women’s movement. Their good relationship, however, was overshadowed in 1908 by a dispute over Fickert’s editorial practices. The disagreement erupted because Fickert had entirely rewritten a news item sent by Schwimmer on the Hungarian women’s movement. He had published the rewritten piece without Schwimmer’s permission.41 After this conflict, Schwimmer did not publish in Neues Frauenleben until 1910, and no further letters from Fickert are found in her correspondence.42

By the 1910s, Schwimmer was able to express her ideas in English with relative fluency. By this time, she was publishing in several English-language journals and attending IWSA congresses every two years, where German and French were also used as official languages, though English became the major language of communication.43 By this time, she had become a well-established member of the international women’s movement, and her articles originally written in German were translated into English by the editorial offices of the papers. In 1910, the editor of the journal Englishwoman asked her permission to publish a translated version of one of her articles originally written in German.44 A few months later, the editor of Englishwoman again commented on Schwimmer’s knowledge of English and criticized the article she had sent to the journal:

Your article on the women’s movement in Hungary is very interesting. If I may say so, the English still sounds of a bit foreign flavour, and the article is very short. […] We cannot offer payment for the articles, as we consider them propaganda, […] but if it is in the interest of the cause, we are happy to publish them.45

Schwimmer did not stop writing propagandistic articles proclaiming the success of progressive women’s associations in Hungary. She continued, however, to work hard on her English. As a result of her efforts, she was capable of writing longer texts and giving relatively long lectures in English. During her lectures, she spoke freely without using notes. She was increasingly strategic in the steps she took to build her career as an international journalist and activist, from which both NOE and FE benefited greatly. Almost from the beginning, the IWSA leadership was open to her innovative ideas. It was Schwimmer who initiated the creation of the organization’s badge and who, at the Copenhagen Congress in 1906, proposed the launch of the organization’s official monthly journal, Ius Suffragii (1906–1924), which was also published in English.46 Schwimmer’s efforts were finally crowned with success. Her articles were published in the most prestigious Western European and North American journals after 1914. Editors of the most outstanding papers (e.g. The New York Times) continued to publish her writings even after her political influence had dissipated.47

Thus, as the discussion above has shown, for Schwimmer, translation was a gateway of sorts to the world of international journalism.48 From the early 1910s, she published not only in women’s journals but also in renowned Western European and North American newspapers and periodicals, as I discuss in greater detail below. The interest taken by the international press in her personality and her articles was further stimulated by the IWSA Congress in Budapest in 1913, as well as by her peace movement activities after the outbreak of World War I.

The most Common Subject-Matters of Schwimmer’s Articles

Schwimmer’s articles, which were written between the turn of the century and 1948, cover a relatively wide range of topics and almost all aspects of womanhood. In terms of genre, they range from news articles consisting of only a few lines (with or without titles) to glosses and reports on various women’s rights events and congresses. They include a wide range of editorials, interviews, and reports. Before 1914, most of her writings were on women’s work and education, the women’s movement, and suffrage, but she also authored many writings on child labor and the various approaches to providing support for mothers. Between 1914 and 1918 and before World War II, the subject of pacifism dominated her articles. After 1920, she started to discuss the motivations behind her political agency. In the 1920s, she also began to reflect on the situation of Jewish people.

From the outset of her journalistic career, Schwimmer wrote on the advancements of women’s emancipation from a transnational perspective. She also published numerous biographical articles on the activities and achievements of various politicians (including Hungarians), women’s movement activists, and artists. This can be interpreted as a career building strategy. I offer here only a few examples as illustrations. Schwimmer regularly published articles on leading figures of the Hungarian and international women’s movement. She wrote several articles on the aforementioned Vilma Glücklich (1872, Vágújhely [today Nové Mesto nad Váhom, Slovakia]–1927, Vienna) after Glücklich’s death in 1927. At the time of FE’s foundation, she regularly published biographical articles on the aforementioned Aletta Jacobs and Carrie Chapman Catt, who also served as a role model for Hungarian progressive women’s activism. The lecture tour held by the two women in Hungary in 1906 was covered in detail not only in A Nő és a Társadalom but also by the Hungarian dailies.49 In addition to her organizational work before the 1913 IWSA Congress in Budapest, she found time and energy to write articles on the event.

Schwimmer also published only on those activists with whom she had personal working or friendly contacts. Thus, the list of activists on whom she wrote offers a clear index of her growing international network of contacts. She wrote several pieces on Helene Stöcker, leader of the radical wing of the German bourgeois women’s movement. Like Schwimmer, Stöcker also emigrated to the United States after World War I. Schwimmer also wrote on Gina Krog, a Norwegian women’s movement activist and one of the founding members of the IWSA. After the death of Marianne Hainisch, president of Bund österreichischer Frauenvereine (Vienna, 1902–), the umbrella organization of the Austrian bourgeois women’s associations for more than three decades, she wrote several obituaries for American newspapers. From the years of World War I until the mid-1940s, she published numerous articles on Count Mihály Károlyi (1875, Fót, Hungary–1955, Vence, France), president of the Hungarian Democratic Republic (acting between November 16, 1918–March 121, 1919), and his wife Katinka Andrássy, both in Hungarian and international journals.50

In autumn 1914, Schwimmer interviewed US President Woodrow Wilson. This interview brought her international recognition. In the months following the outbreak of World War I, in part thanks to the efforts of the aforementioned Catt, Schwimmer undertook a determined campaign to persuade President Wilson to assume the role of neutral mediator in hopes of bringing the war to a swift conclusion. In September, President Wilson received Schwimmer at the White House and granted her a formal interview. Schwimmer’s efforts were not crowned with success, however, in spite of the fact that she met Wilson for a second time in 1915 and that both presidential audiences were widely covered by the media. Schwimmer herself also reported on the events in the international press.51

Probably most of Schwimmer’s articles after 1916 were written on her dispute with US magnate Henry Ford.52 After the unsuccessful negotiations with President Wilson, Schwimmer finally managed to persuade Ford in November 1915 to finance the (in)famous Peace Ship. This became well-known in world history under the name of the Ford Peace Expedition. Most of the participants in this mission were influential Americans, including, of course, Schwimmer and Ford, as well as a number of journalists. The ship carrying them sailed from Hoboken (New York harbor) on December 4, crossing the Atlantic and arriving in Oslo. Its primary aim was to draw attention to the importance of immediate peace negotiations. However, the world press and later Schwimmer herself reported only on the disputes among the passengers, who quarreled with one another during the voyage. During the cruise, Schwimmer’s and Ford’s earlier conflicts became irreconcilable differences.53

The failure of the Ford Peace Ship and the conflict between Schwimmer and Ford was partly caused by Schwimmer’s eccentric personality and aggressive attitudes. This failure led to the collapse of Schwimmer’s carefully nurtured political influence in the United States in 1914–1915. This was exacerbated by a barrage of derisive, disparaging articles and cartoons in the international press, which deeply undermined Schwimmer’s earlier popularity.54 This was the reason why, during the three decades of her exile in the United States, Schwimmer published a large number of articles criticizing Henry Ford and excusing herself in the most popular American and Hungarian American periodicals. Numerous articles appeared, for instance, in The Day, The New York Publisher’s Weekly, New York Herald Tribune, Buffalo News, The New York Times, Amerikai Magyar Népszava (American Hungarian People’s Word), and Az Írás (The Writing), in which she sought to clarify Ford’s political role in 1918. It is important to keep in mind, as an important element of the backdrop of these disputes, that Schwimmer never received US citizenship on account of her pacifist beliefs, and her documents thus always labeled her as “stateless.”55

Even in the 1940s, editors of well-established periodicals were still happy to publish Schwimmer’s articles and other writings or interviews with her, despite the fact that she was no longer part of the leadership of the Hungarian and international peace and women’s movement organizations. Why did the press take such a strong interest in her work and ideas? I argue that this was partly because Schwimmer remained in relatively close contact with a number of influential politicians, public figures, artists, and activists in the United States and Europe. This fact, together with her eventful life and controversial personality, made her interesting to the press. Her previous involvement in domestic political affairs in the United States only made her more interesting to the press, as did her unsuccessful years-long fight for US citizenship, not to mention the (false) accusations according to which she had served as a Soviet during her diplomatic mission in Switzerland. These various factors made her an interesting figure for broad readerships.56

“The Grievances of Feminism during the Proletarian Dictatorship”:57
A Close Reading of Two Articles by Schwimmer

In the discussion below, I analyze two editorials written by Schwimmer in December 1919 and January 1920. I argue that these articles offer insights into her journalistic ars poetica, her values, and her political orientation. In these texts, Schwimmer problematizes FE’s and her own controversial relations with the Hungarian Soviet Republic and the social-democratic women’s associations. The texts thus offer indirect explanations for her decision to emigrate. They also provide insights into FE’s views on women’s employment and women’s labor activism, which differed from the views of the abovementioned groups. Finally, in these two texts, Schwimmer lists the alleged crimes committed by the Hungarian Soviet Republic against women and the discriminatory practices of the Republic against women when it came to paid work. Her journalistic ars poetica, her values, and her political orientation changed very little during her lifetime, including the period of nearly three decades that she spent in exile. The texts also reveal her views on the regime changes after World War I and on the short-lived Soviet Republic. Finally, the texts also give an impression of the image Schwimmer wanted to convey of herself to the public immediately before she emigrated from Hungary in January 1920. The texts are important in part simply because the political, economic, and social shifts (and upheavals) that took place over the course of the few months covered in the articles had a profound impact on Schwimmer’s later life and career. It became evident at the time that her active political involvement as an envoy of the Károlyi government in Switzerland had made her persona non grata for the authorities in Hungary. Due to these factors, she decided to leave her home country and live in exile.58

With regard to the historical moment in which these texts were published, it is important to note that, in the wake of the Great War, the heretofore relatively stable situation of FE and the positions of the entire progressive feminist movement in Hungary weakened. The Soviet Republic and the subsequent regimes (during what is known as the Horthy Era after Regent Miklós Horthy) made every effort to marginalize feminists. There was also a radical attempt to limit the press activity and press coverage that the movement had established for itself over the course of the previous decade and a half. Publication of A Nő. Feminista Folyóirat was banned, first in 1919 and then temporarily in 1920. Through revisionist propaganda, the valorization of religious and nationalistic ideas, the glorification of women’s (traditional) roles within the family, and the demonization of the belief systems of progressive feminists, the foundations of a whole new women’s movement were finally laid. At the heart of this was the Magyar Asszonyok Nemzeti Szövetsége (National Association of Hungarian Women, or MANSz), founded in January 1919 by the writer and activist Cécile Tormay, which according to some sources managed to grow to approximately half a million members in Budapest and the rest of Hungary by the eve of World War II.59

As Rosika Schwimmer herself emphasized several times in the two texts, the new circumstances did not automatically bring an end to the feminist movement. This does not mean, of course, that the various organizations and figures at the vanguard of this movement did not suffer enormous setbacks, as Schwimmer notes in the texts. Beyond the specific examples mentioned by Schwimmer in the texts, it is worth noting that NOE, for instance, was unable to adapt to the challenges that arose in the new transitional period. Some members of NOE, which had been dissolved in the summer of 1919, joined the Communist Party, while others joined FE. FE could never regain its former position within the new right-wing women’s movement of the interwar period. Nevertheless, in the early 1920s, it managed to redefine itself and its aims. Thus, although it was only able to operate within a narrower framework than before, it remained active until it was banned in 1942, and it then became active again between 1946 and 1949.

The two articles are the first two pieces in a series of articles that were to be published in the future. As I have already noted, Schwimmer wrote these texts for A Nő. Feminista Folyóirat right before she left Hungary. In the end, only the first part of the series of articles was published in December 1919 under the title “The grievances of feminism under the proletarian dictatorship.”60 The second part survives in the Rosika Schwimmer Papers, among the numerous unpublished manuscripts and draft speeches.61 This handwritten text is in some places difficult to read, since Schwimmer almost invariably recorded her articles and drafts in pencil on poor-quality paper until she emigrated to the United States. Beginning in 1921, the handwritten notes, which were written for the most part in Hungarian, gradually disappeared, and most of the later texts were typed in English.

The two texts thoroughly clarify the relationship between the Hungarian Soviet Republic and the progressive feminist movement. They can, thus, also be interpreted as an indirect explanation of Schwimmer’s decision to leave Hungary permanently. In addition, the writings reflect on a number of issues that were discussed on several occasions within the framework of FE, as well as the Magyarországi Munkásnő Egyesület (Hungarian Working Women’s Association, or MME, Budapest, 1903–) and the broader labor movement. MME was headed by Marika Gárdos, with whom Schwimmer had had a rather complicated relationship since 1902. Their relationship was characterized as much by camaraderie as by conflict and rivalry. Although Schwimmer was actively involved in the establishment of MME and Gárdos followed the activities of FE, conflicts between the two associations were inevitable. The goals of feminist organizations and social democratic women’s organizations differed dramatically, as did the ideal means with which these goals were to be achieved. This led to the two associations insulting each other in every possible way, for example at their official meetings, in their public protest events, and in the press.

This controversy ridden relationship was important for several reasons. Liberal and radical feminists at the time were often accused of campaigning exclusively for the extension of female suffrage and of being unconcerned about the social and economic problems faced by working-class women and women who belonged to ethnic minorities. These two articles, however, clearly show that this picture needs to be considerably more nuanced. In this context, the texts highlight the most important points of contention between feminists and contemporary Hungarian socialists on women’s paid work, their position in the labor market, their organization, and their wages.

In addition to the abovementioned issues, the texts touch on issues that were on the agenda of FE from its foundation, including women’s employment structures and the issue of equal pay, women’s (vocational) education, the protection of mothers and children, the promotion of women’s labor activism, the fight against prostitution and sex-trafficking, and sex education in schools. Considering the prominence of these issues in the texts, alongside other important points, it is evident that Schwimmer’s reflections in the two articles refer not only to the Hungarian Soviet Republic but also to the nearly two decades of the history of FE and the cornerstones of the controversy between feminists and social democrats.

In the text, Schwimmer reveals the indirect insults made by the Soviet Republic against her and FE and also notes its direct attacks against feminist ideology in general and against FE in particular. In the first article, Schwimmer contends that FE managed to escape “violent dissolution” because of “its membership and representation in several international women’s federations, and the People’s Commissar’s fear of protests from foreign feminists.”62 Since Béla Kun (1886, Hadad, Romania–1938–1939, Moscow), People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs and War under the Soviet Republic, considered feminist ideology “a remnant of bourgeois ideology,” the dictatorship mobilized all possible means against organized feminism. In addition to banning the secret meetings of FE’s board, the authorities also made it impossible for the association to publish its official journal between March and August 1919. Schwimmer offered a detailed list in the article of the crimes allegedly committed by the regime against progressive feminist ideology and the feminist press.

At several points in the text, Schwimmer impresses upon the reader that the dictatorship had the characteristics of a medieval state: it was both anti-democratic and anti-feminist. She does not fail to mention that women who, like her, refused to join trade unions were not allowed to vote. Female suffrage had already been introduced by the government of Mihály Károlyi. In addition, the communist regime, which was in power for 133 days, had, according to Schwimmer, enacted legislation that would have continued the exploitation of working women in line with previous practices. She pointed out that the FE (along with other women’s associations and trade unions) had been fighting against this kind of exploitation since 1904. Its main objectives included equal pay for men and women workers and the introduction of a complex system of health care, as well as support for working mothers. The Soviet Republic did not achieve any of this, and Schwimmer blames it for this failure. Towards the end of the first article, she discusses the situation of married women and the problems of regulating prostitution. These ideas fully reflect the initial objectives of the FE, which were published immediately after its establishment in 1905.63

The second (handwritten and unpublished) part of the article focuses almost exclusively on discrimination against women in paid employment. Schwimmer provides precise statistics showing that, despite the regime’s widely trumpeted principle of “equal pay for equal work,” women workers were paid significantly lower wages than men. In my opinion, this is the most detailed and well-developed part of the article. These arguments are followed by a brief reflection on marriage, prostitution, and the centralized household (or Zentralhaushaltung in German).64 After this discussion, the text ends abruptly. And although Schwimmer indicates at the end of the paper that the article will be continued, I have not found the third part in her collection.

Brand Building in the Press

Over the course of her career as a journalist, Rosika Schwimmer learned how to use the press as a tool to build her brand (in modern terms). The interviews that were done with her with by journalists who worked for world-renowned papers provided an excellent platform for this. Through these interviews, Schwimmer was (or wished to be) able to influence the public and the public’s perception of her. She followed the same practice in her work as an author, of which I give an example at the end of this paper. Schwimmer’s brand-building efforts offer insights into her strategic use of the media and personal connections to shape her public image in exile. In 1928, Schwimmer, who had been living in the United States for some seven years as an emigrant, published her first book, which was an illustrated children’s book in English. Tisza Tales, which contains Hungarian stories, was published by Doubleday-Doran Publishing Company in New York.65 Reviews of the book were published in American and American-Hungarian periodicals and newspapers between 1928 and 1931, and they were systematically archived in the Rosika Schwimmer Papers. From these reviews, it is clear that Schwimmer herself actively sought to influence the press response to the book and, thus, to her own work as an author. Her efforts to influence the reception of Tisza Tales reveals her strategic use of branding principles in a literary context, highlighting the interplay between her various public roles. Furthermore, the mixed reception with which the book met and Schwimmer’s responses to criticism offer insights into the challenges and complexities of her brand management.

Despite Schwimmer’s efforts, the reception of the storybook on the US book market was mixed. In addition to the reviews, there were also several articles in both the American and the American-Hungarian periodical press which, while promising a review of the book in their titles, for much of their length focus on Schwimmer’s political efforts and, more importantly, her active political involvement. The positive reviews praise the book’s “fantastic,” “elegant,” and “charming” presentation, as well as the illustrations. According to several reviews, the stories are engaging for adults as well as children.66

Many praised the book’s language and style, which according to the reviews are particularly charming and accessible to children. Schwimmer’s American friends and acquaintances of Hungarian origin living in the United States also played a major role in organizing the publication of the reviews. Zoltán Haraszti, a newspaper editor and librarian who lived in New York for many years, Lola Maverick, Schwimmer’s wealthy American patron, and women’s movement activist Alice Park did much to help the cause. In October 1929, Park offered the following comments on her progress in promoting the book:

I succeeded in getting a review of Tisza Tales in Open Forum of October 5. I sent a copy to the publisher and one to Franceska [Franciska Schwimmer (1880, Budapest–1963, New York), Rosika Schwimmer’s younger sister, who also emigrated to the USA and worked as her elder sister’s secretary]. I have tried in vain for other reviews. But have succeeded with libraries and their order lists.67

The review published in Open Forum also mentioned that Schwimmer’s mother had told her daughter the stories in the book when Schwimmer had been a child. Tisza Tales was named one of the 50 most outstanding children’s books of 1928 by the Chicago Evening Post and was included in the New York Times Christmas Booklist.68

In addition to the American English-language newspapers, the book also received a relatively large amount of attention in the American Hungarian press. This was due in part to Schwimmer’s personal relationships with many journal editors but certainly also to the book’s importance. Amerikai Magyar Népszava emphasized that the storybook introduced Americans to the “gems of Hungarian storytelling” and that it also offered Hungarian children born in the United States, who had become somewhat Americanized, an unforgettable reading experience in English that took them to the world of stories from their parents’ homeland.69 According to a columnist for the periodical Az Írás, published in Chigago, “the irredentism of the beaten track has not done Hungary as good a service as the book of the bowed down writer.” In their view, the collection of stories was the biggest Christmas sensation in America’s extremely rich book market.70

According to the article in Az Írás, the publisher had not been excessive when giving the book what was arguably a high price, since, “printed on 250 pages of molded paper, it was a book in the artisanal sense of the word.”71 Many, however, considered the storybook overpriced, and it was indeed quite expensive at the time compared to most books. The New York Herald Tribune was not far off the mark when it wrote that, for $5, the storybook would be a hard sell. The Public Library of the District of Columbia in Washington, D.C. claimed that the book was not on the American Library Association’s book list because it was priced above the limit for which libraries could buy books.72

It should be pointed out that two rather negative reviews appeared in The New York Herald Tribune and the New York World, which Schwimmer and her circle of friends did not ignore. Schwimmer herself wrote an indignant letter to the editor of The New York Herald Tribune, accusing the author of the review of not having read Tisza Tales. In his reply, the editor of the newspaper said that Schwimmer’s allegation was nonsense and that it was only natural that someone might not like a book. He also stressed that, as editor, he was not able to read every book reviewed and that it was not his job to judge or overrule the opinions of reviewers. At the end of his letter, he added the following:

These things are always happening, you know. If every author who did not agree with his reviewer were to reply we should have little room for new reviews. Personally, I am sorry, but one cannot let personal friendship dictate editorial action.73

Tivadar/Theodor Koppányi, a physician and university professor who was a confidant of the Schwimmer family and also Schwimmer’s family doctor, responded to the other review, which was published in The New York World. According to this review, the main problem with Schwimmer’s book was that a similar children’s book had already been published in London by Nándor Pogány (The Hungarian Fairy Book). Nevertheless, Koppányi insisted that Schwimmer was a pioneer in this field, if only because her book contained a completely different type of fairy tale from that of Nándor Pogány’s book.74

Conclusion

This article has explored the defining contours of Rosika Schwimmer’s journalistic career, with a particular focus on how her political activism and personal ambitions shaped and were shaped by her engagement with the press. I have argued that Schwimmer’s political agency, rooted in the interconnected struggles for women’s suffrage and international peace, was instrumental in launching her journalistic trajectory. However, the same qualities that made her a powerful public actor (her uncompromising stance, her self-promotion strategies, and her refusal to conform to conventional gender norms) ultimately contributed to her marginalization within increasingly conservative or male-dominated professional spaces.

To understand the mechanisms with which Schwimmer sought to assert herself as both journalist and activist, I turned to the rich collection of her papers: her diary notes, extensive correspondence (both official and private and both incoming and outgoing), and the vast body of journalistic texts and speeches that she carefully archived. These documents provide more than biographical detail. They reveal a methodical effort to shape her own public memory and to control the narrative of her life’s work. Her archival practice itself can be interpreted as an extension of her political and authorial agency. It constituted a refusal to be misrepresented or forgotten and an assertion of her right to define her own legacy. This is especially evident in Series 2 of her papers, where she organized her articles.

In tandem with articles written about her and interviews she gave during different periods of her life, these self-curated materials illuminate a complex media strategy aimed at navigating gendered constraints on women’s participation in public discourse. Schwimmer was acutely aware of the challenges facing women who sought intellectual and political authority in early twentieth-century Europe and North America. Her story thus exemplifies how women could and, in her case and others, did use journalism as both a platform for advocacy and a means of crafting enduring cultural capital.

From the perspective of gender history and feminist theory, Schwimmer’s career invites us to reconsider the boundaries of political agency. Her case reveals how women in marginal or contested positions mobilized the tools of authorship, archiving, and self-representation not simply to “participate” in public life but also actively to construct the conditions under which their voices would be heard and remembered. In this sense, her biography challenges static understandings of women as secondary figures in the media or political history of the period. She emerged instead as a historical agent whose efforts to claim discursive spaces across borders, languages, and genres were both innovative and deeply reflective of the structural limitations she faced.

Finally, to put this issue in a larger context, I briefly compared the journalistic activity of Schwimmer with the leading female journalists, editors, translators, and authors of books in the region, i.e. with the aforementioned Austrian progressive women’s activist Auguste Fickert,75 and two important activists from the region i.e. Slovenian feminist Zofka Kveder,76 and German radical women’s rights activist and later völkisch politician Käthe Schirmacher.77

Schwimmer, Fickert, Kveder, and Schirmacher each wielded journalistic platforms to advance different yet overlapping feminist agendas across diverse linguistic and cultural spheres before 1918. Each of these four women that they became central figures of their national women’s movements through their journalistic activity. Schwimmer leveraged her international connections to report on every aspect of women’s emancipation and peace activism. Kveder published on the situation of women wage earners and women’s university education. Schirmacher’s articles analyzed different aspects of transnational women’s movement and issues related to legal reforms for women’s rights, women’s employment, and prostitution. As multilingual women, Schwimmer, Kveder, and Schirmacher published their articles in many countries apart from their home homelands. In contrast, Fickert focused her journalistic efforts primarily on Austria in her efforts to advocate women’s suffrage and support women’s rights in the field of education and on the labor market.

All four women engaged with contemporary feminist debates. Schwimmer’s focus extended beyond national borders to global peace movements and pacifist activism. Schirmacher’s work was deeply embedded in the specifics of German legal and social reform, while Kveder’s journalism often took a more literary and regionally focused approach, highlighting the lived experiences of women in a multi-ethnic context. Fickert’s idealistic views are reflected in her articles, as is her sympathy for the social-democratic women’s associations. Their collective journalistic output reveals a diverse yet interconnected struggle for women’s emancipation and social justice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

After 1920, a different world emerged in the field of women’s journalism. As Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe have argued in their edited volume, although mainstream conservative newspapers typically preferred their female correspondents to cover exclusively “women’s” issues, it is notable that certain right-wing women managed to secure column space to discuss political matters from a nationalist (or radical) viewpoint. Some established their strong patriotic stance by criticizing nationalist men for any perceived weakening of their ideological dedication. Others achieved this by completely disregarding their own gender while still advocating for conservative family values and a “natural” separation of roles between men and women, which communists, liberals, or feminists (or a combination thereof) were allegedly trying to dismantle. Hungarian journalist Cécile Tormay, who was also the leader of MANSZ, the most powerful right-wing women’s association, offers a clear example of this.78 By this time, however, Fickert had been dead for ten years, and Kveder and Schirmacher were struggling with worsening health. Schirmacher, however, was one of the founders of the right-wing Deutschnationale Volkspartei (German National People’s Party), and she briefly entered the National Assembly in 1919 as its deputy and representative for West Prussia. Schwimmer was practically forced to leave Hungary, and while she remained a widely-published publicist in the United States, she did not send articles to Hungarian periodicals except for the official organ of FE.

Archival Sources

Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Országos Levéltára, Budapest [Hungarian National Archives] (MNL OL)

P999. Feministák Egyesülete [Feminists’ Association]

New York Public Library (NYPL)

Manuscript and Archives Division

MssCol 6398 Rosika Schwimmer Papers (RSP)

MssCol 6318 Leopold and Berta Katscher Papers 1866–1939 (LBKP)

Wienbibliothek im Rathaus (WR)

LQH0003431 Nachlass Auguste Fickert (NF)

Bibliography

Printed sources

Schwimmer, Rosika. Tisza Tales. Stories from Hungary: Retold for American Children, Illustrations by Willy Pogany. New York: Doubleday-Doran, 1928.

Tájékoztatás a Feministák Egyesületének céljairól és munkatervéről [Information on the aims and work plan of the Feminists’ Association]. Budapest: Márkus Samu könyvnyomdája, 1905.

Periodicals

“Annual Report of the Feminists’ Association.” A Nő és a Társadalom 1, no. 5 (1907): 89.

Bédy-Schwimmer, Rosika. “Két kiváló asszony [Two Outstanding Women].” Új Idők, October 14, 1906, 383–84.

Egy női reporter [A Female Reporter]. “Laptudósítói tanfolyam” [Course for newspaper correspondents]. A Nő. Feminista Folyóirat 1, no. 12 (1914): 244–45.

“Karácsonykor magyar könyvet olvasnak az amerikai aprószentek” [At Christmas, the American Altar Boys read a Hungarian Book]. Az Írás, January 6, 1929.

“Nők a sajtóban” [Women in the Press]. A Nő és a Társadalom 6, no. 10 (1912): 185.

Schwimmer, Rosika “A feminizmus sérelmei a proletárdiktatúra alatt” [The Grievances of Feminism during the Proletarian Dictatorship]. A Nő. Feminista Folyóirat 6 no. 6 (1919): 2–3.

Z. Sz. “Magyar mesék angol nyelven” [Hungarian Fairy Tales in English]. Amerikai Magyar Népszava, December 14, 1928.

Secondary literature

Brighton, Paul, and Dennis Foy. News Values. London: Sage, 2007.

Delap, Lucy, Maria DiCenzo, and Leila Ryan. Feminism and the Periodical Press, 1900–1918. Vol 1 of the Feminism and the Periodical Press, 1900–1918. London: Routledge, 2007.

Fedeles-Czeferner, Dóra. Progressive Women’s Movements in Austria and Hungary: Conflict, Cooperation, Circulation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2025.

Gehmacher, Johanna, Elisa Heinrich, and Corinna Oesch. Käthe Schirmacher: Agitation und autobiographische Praxis zwischen radikaler Frauenbewegung und völkischer Politik. Vienna–Cologne–Weimar: Böhlau, 2018.

Gehmacher, Johanna. Feminist Activism, Travel and Translation Around 1900: Transnational Practices of Mediation and the Case of Käthe Schirmacher. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024.

Gyáni, Gábor, and György Kövér. Magyarország társadalomtörténete a reformkortól a második világháborúig [Social history of Hungary from the Reform era until the end of the Second World War]. Budapest: Osiris, 2001.

Gyáni, Gábor. A nő élete – Történelmi perspektívában [The life of the eoman – in historical perspective]. Budapest: Bölcsészettudományi Kutatóközpont, 2020.

Hacker, Hanna. “Fickert, Auguste” (1855–1910). In A Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminism: Central, Eastern, and South Eastern European, 19th and 20th Centuries, edited by Francisca de Haan et al, 131–33. Budapest: CEU Press, 2006.

Hanák, Péter. A dualizmus korának történeti problémái [Historical problems of the Dualist era]. Budapest: Tankönyvkiadó, 1971.

Klaus, Elisabeth, and Ulla Wischermann. Journalistinnen: Eine Geschichte in Biographien und Texten 1848–1990. Vienna–Berlin: LIT, 2013.

Koncz, Katalin. Nők a munka világában [Women in the world of labor]. Budapest: Kossuth, 1982.

Lake, Marilyn. Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism. St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1999.

McFadden, H. Margaret. “A Radical Exchange: Rosika Schwimmer, Emma Goldman, Hella Wuolijoki and Red-White Struggles for Women.” In Women’s Movements: Networks and Debates in Post-Communist Countries in the 19th and 20th Centuries, edited by Edith Saurer, 494–504. Cologne–Vienna: Böhlau, 2006.

Mészáros, Zsolt. “Wohl-nővérek munkássága: Irodalom, sajtó, szalon” [Activity of the Wohl sisters: Literature, press, salon]. PhD diss., Eötvös Loránd University, 2016.

Offen, Karen. European Feminisms, 1700–1950: A Political History. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.

Poniz, Katja Mihurko. “Kveder, Zofka.” In A Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminism: Central, Eastern, and South Eastern European, 19th and 20th Centuries, edited by Francisca de Haan et al, 282–84. Budapest: CEU Press, 2006.

Rupp, Leila J. Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.

Sharp, Ingrid, and Matthew Stibbe. “Introduction.” In Women Activists between War and Peace: Europe, 1918–1923, edited by Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe, 1–29. London: Bloomsbury Acaemic, 2017.

Szapor, Judith. “Who Represents Hungarian Women? The Demise of the Liberal Bourgeois Women’s Rights Movement and the Rise of the Rightwing Women’s Movement in the Aftermath of World War I.” In Aftermaths of War: Women’s Movements and Female Activists, 1918–1923, edited by Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe, 245–67. Leiden: Brill, 2011.

Szapor, Judith. “‘Good Hungarian Women’ vs. ‘Radicals, Feminists, and Jewish Intellectuals’: Rosika Schwimmer and the Hungarian Women’s Debating Club in 1918–1919.” Women’s History Review, Agency, Activism and Organization, Special Issue 28, no 6 (2017): 1–19.

“Terror against Women.” The Struggle of “Red” Women at the Beginning
of the Nazi Era: Between Invisibility and Solidarity*

Anna Veronica Pobbe

Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Hungarian Historical Review Volume 14 Issue 3 (2025): 443-458 DOI 10.38145/2025.3.443

When the men kill, it is up to us women to fight
for the preservation of life. When the men are silent,
it is our duty to raise our voices on behalf of our ideals.1

In a 1934 publication of the International Red Aid (MOPR), it can be read that Rudolf Diels, head of the Gestapo between 1933 and 1934, described communist women as “the most stubborn enemies of the state because they did not become informers despite being tortured.” Despite their absence in higher positions of the RHD (Rote Hilfe Deutschland, German Red Aid), women played a major role in the activities of the RHD: “It was women [in fact] who drove the bailiffs out of their homes and the provocative Nazis out of the welfare office. […] In the Ruhr region, proletarian housewives put together a delegation and demanded a pay rise for their husbands in the factories. Women prevented arrests and demanded the release of their husbands. This was the case in Berlin and Breslau, where women snatched an arrested apprentice and market trader from the police. In Berlin, the police were unable to arrest a communist in one factory because the workers threatened to go on strike. In the Rhineland, 40 women went to the district administration office and demanded the release of their husbands. In another place, 60 women and their children forced the release of 40 prisoners through a demonstration. In Freiburg, women achieved the release of a communist woman.”2 Taking this attestation as our starting point, the current paper aims to shed a light, at first, on the communist women activism during the Nazi Era. This activism is also reported by some members, like Rosa Lindemann, who was also the leader of a mostly women resistance group based in the Tiergarten district of Berlin: “Some of our women helped the men whose wives had been arrested in the household and looked after the children. We had contacted over thirty families and were able to alleviate some of the suffering. It was a particular joy for us to hear how happy our comrades in the prisons and penitentiaries were that we were looking after their relatives and caring for them.”3 Secondly, the paper aims to address the peculiar strategies that were used by the women, like it has been reported in the Berlin Moabit case, where there was a circle of women, that organized relief campaigns and met weekly, disguised as coffee parties or meetings in garden sheds; these women collected money for relatives of the prisoners and helped resistance fighters who had gone into hiding.4 Last, but not the least, the paper aims to address some key-role women in the Red Aid scenario: like Ottilie Pohl, who died in Theresienstadt.

Keywords: communist women, political activism, solidarity, Third Reich, resistance

Introduction:
Solidarity among German Women between Weimar and the Nazi Era

The history of German women’s associations is a complex, varied, and intertwined with the history of the legislative recognition of women as actors in public life.5 Far from proposing to offer an exhaustive picture of this history, the following essay focuses on politically oriented women’s associationism, with specific emphasis on a communist association, attempting to highlight behaviors, personalities, and actions carried out in the period between the National Socialist regime’s rise to power until the end of 1935, the year of Liselotte (Lilo) Hermann’s arrest.6 The choice to focus on this period and in these specific terms is motivated by what the documents have shown. Communist women were, initially, underestimated, even by their own comrades, who often hindered their efforts in the Party. Secondly, when the Nazy party took power, these women began to be persecuted, deported, and often killed by the new regime. Through a constant search for strategies, first of resistance and then of survival, these women never ceased to be activists. The final aim of this essay is to show how the struggle of communist women to be recognized was fought until it was no longer physically possible to do so.

It is also important to emphasize at the outset that, despite its specific goals, the story to be told here is neither specifically German nor monochromatic in terms of political alignments. Communist women’s associationism was, in fact, avowedly transnational, and the battle for the recognition of women’s participation was a common thread among almost all party platforms of the time. Emblematic in this regard are the words of Gertrud Bäumer, president of the Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine (BDF), the largest bourgeois women’s association during the Weimar Republic. In a 1918 speech, Bäumer declared that “German women are forced to breastfeed their babies with their hands tied behind their backs.” 7 The image evoked by Bäumer later became one of the strongest and most defining symbols of femininity in the interwar period, namely the icon of the self-sacrificing mother.8 This iconography of the mother-martyr was also part of the narrative of proletarian women, according to which sacrifice was oriented toward a totalizing political life. 9

In addition to the roles of icons of womanhood, another motif in the narratives and events I describe here is the link between women (also understood as political actors) and welfare activities. Associationism on a welfare basis was initially the main area of aggregation among women, since at least until the 1920s many German states denied women the right of associationism.10 However, even when political associationism was secured, care activities were defined as “a special area for women’s abilities, and as such they [women] must be given a prominent role in this area.”11 Statements like this reflect what Rouette and Selwyn say was a fairly common expectation in early postwar Germany, namely that women were the caregivers of society.12

The social tensions and clashes that ensued in the period following World War I, however, made evident what Kaplan describes as the “contradiction between the feminine sacrificial ideal and real female power in society,” leading to the consolidation of what Kaplan defines as a new female obsession: survival.13 This “obsession” was also visible in the activities carried out by German communist women, who managed to forge a path of militancy and solidarity despite a cumbersome iconography and increasingly cramped spaces.

The Struggle for Recognition inside the Parties

One of the difficulties that German women encountered within the parties in their efforts to have the “women’s” issue recognized and put on the political agenda was the autonomous management of welfare activities. Regardless of political alignments, between the 1920s and the 1930s, a real “commonality of difficulties” regarding women’s associations came to be established. I offer below three examples of this “commonality.”

The first example comes from the context that one might label with the adjective “bourgeois.” In 1924, Humanitas was founded, a handmaiden association of the BDF, which in its founding statute declared that women should be guaranteed a primary role in welfare work.14 Humanitas was founded at the initiative of Gertrud Bäumer, who had entrusted Anne Von Giercke with the organization of humanitarian activities, especially in areas involving members of the younger generations. This universalistic humanitarian ambition never really found expression, however, due mainly to the opposition of male officials and doctors within both the Ministry of Labor and the Langstein organizations, which were a series of interdenominational organizations dedicated to welfare activities and medical care.15

The second example concerns the German women’s socialist movement, which, as historian Charles Sowerwine has observed, was the largest women’s movement of any political color on the European continent between 1890 and 1914.16 Sowerwine contends that the initial independence of the female side from its male counterpart was central to the success of this movement.17 However, the goal of liberating working women from both the male yoke and capitalism, which Marxist theorist and activist for women’s rights Clara Zetkin called for in a speech in 1889, 18 was never achieved because of a dependence on the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Party of Germany, or SPD), which , as Karen Honeycutt has observed, was always male-driven and was fundamentally incapable of liberating women from the oppression of the family.19 Zetkin herself, who left the SPD after the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg, was highly critical of the party’s failure to develop a strategy of women’s emancipation, as this failure, in her eyes, meant an unwillingness to break with bourgeois tradition.20

Finally, the most emblematic example in this regard was the evolution of women’s activism within the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (German Communist Party, or KPD). In the mid-1920s, the KPD implemented a series of measures to recruit women into the party ranks and improve women’s rights, culminating in the creation of a new association called the Roter Frauen und Mädchen Bund (Red Women’s and Girls’ League, or RFMB), which was founded in 1925.21 As Sara Ann Sewell has noted, the party considered women’s militancy fundamental,22 and RFMB members were incited to take part in a variety of propaganda activities.23 However, while inciting the active participation of female comrades, communist men generally remained reluctant to grant political equality to their female counterparts, as evidenced by the following statement made by a woman at the 1930 district party convention: “Very many male party comrades still hold the petty-bourgeois-opportunistic viewpoint that women belong at the cooking pot. They don’t believe it is necessary to inform their wives or to bring them to meetings.”24

The “commonality of difficulties” described above never led to cooperation among the various associations, which always directed their outpourings of solidarity more toward their own “comrades” than toward other women’s organizations.25 According to Honeycutt, the lack of solidarity among the various women’s associations was due to at least three reasons: 1) the “long shadow” of the anti-socialist laws issued under Bismark; 2) strong discrimination against proletarian women; and 3) the presence of anti-cooperation activists such as Zetkin, who always opposed cooperation with women whom she regarded as bourgeois.26

Rote Hilfe Deutschland: A Women’s Association

Rote Hilfe Deutschland (Red Aid Germany, or RHD) was founded in 1924. In the period between the Weimar Republic and the early years of the Nazi era, it became the leading humanitarian organization devoted to the cause of political prisoners on German soil.27 RHD was formally set up as a German detachment of the Russian social-service organization Mezhdunarodnaya organizatsiya pomoshchi bortsam revolyutsii (or MOPR), known most commonly in English as International Red Aid. MOPR was a humanitarian organization linked to the Communist International. It was founded in 1922 to provide support and aid to communist prisoners and their families.28

RHD can be defined as a women’s association for two reasons. First, it was heir to a specific humanitarian tradition, including the work of organizations such as Frauenhilfe für politische Gefangene (Women’s Aid for Political Prisoners),29 which was founded in Munich in 1919 and which in its four years of activity managed to distinguish itself as a humanitarian body even outside the work of the KPD. Second, RHD was called a “women’s organization” even by the male members of the party.30

The clearly defined political orientation never limited, at least in terms of public statements, the humanitarian thrust of the RHD’s communiqués, in which it defined itself as “a nonpartisan organization devoted to the assistance of all political prisoners, whatever their political beliefs.”31 Within this narrative, the notion that welfare efforts should never show any trace of discrimination was central:

Aid is not only a relief to the material needs of prisoners and their oppressed families, it is also an enormous lever to uplift all those who hesitate, to strengthen the spirit and resistance of prisoners, to give new strength to those in the anti-fascist struggle. […] Solidarity must include all victims, without exception, regardless of which party they ever belonged to and regardless of their worldview.32

However, as was true in the case of the way in which the women’s issue was regarded within the KPD, there was a similarly strong discrepancy between words and acts in the RHD. Historians such as Kurt Schilde and Klaus-Michael Mallmann have called attention to this ambivalence.33 Their analysis of the communiqués issued by the organization reveal that the RHD did not even consider itself a welfare organization, even going so far as to declare, “we never intended to become charitable in the bourgeois sense of the term.” Despite this contention, however, both Schilde and Mallmann agree that the RHD, by pruning its welfare activities, closely resembled the various “bourgeois” associations that were particularly active on the German scene at the time.34

Like many other welfare associations, RHD was an association with high female participation,35 but it never succeeded in balancing power relations within the Communist Party, where women always represented a minority. As Sewell observes, one should not be fooled by the presence in the history of the KPD of figures such as Zetkin, Luxemburg, Fischer, who managed to hold high ranks in the party hierarchy. The presence of these women did not change the nature of the party, which remained, according to Helen Boak, an “out-and-out men’s party.”36 Mallmann notes, however, that in 1928 women comprised 23 percent of the KPD, a proportion significantly higher than in any other German party of the time. So even before the beginning of the “Terror Era” (as it was dubbed by the KPD), the scenario for women involved in political activities was very limited and limiting. In the 1930s, the women involved in RHD welfare activities had to face another hardship: the National Socialist movement. The Nazis’ rise to power became the fundamental external factor that drastically limited women’s opportunities for political involvement. It had two immediate consequences. The first was a collapse in women’s participation (in KPD activities), which declined by up to 10 percent. The second concerned the motivation that drove many “comrades” to withdraw from militancy and activism. This motive was fear.37

On the Front Lines: Activism and Acts against Nazi Terror

With the banning of the KPD by the Nazi authorities, one of the first measures taken by the party was to dissolve all women’s auxiliary associations, a step taken in August 1933, i.e., very soon after the Nazi rise to power. There were two main reasons behind this decision. The first involved the disorientation experienced by the KPD in the early years of the “period of illegality,” as has been noted by Silke Makowski.38 The second (which was probably more important than the first) relates to the prevailing machismo within the party itself. About the latter, we have already seen how associations such as the RHD were considered more in keeping with the “feminine nature” of “women’s” work than the efforts of groups that might have engaged in armed struggle.39 It took two years for the KPD leadership cadres to open itself again women’s activism, as shown, for instance, by the following statement:

Women are particularly well-suited to carry out outreach activities. Women must be included in the functions of all our work, as broadly as possible, decisively and through the elimination of all prejudices that exist within our ranks. There is much evidence that the wives of arrested anti-fascists have agreed to take over the functions of their husbands.40

Despite the formal disestablishment of women’s sections, communist women continued to be active promoters of spontaneous initiatives and demonstrations, sometimes exploiting in their favor the prejudices according to which they should serve merely as a “fifth wheel” of the party.41 As for the media-propaganda sphere, a 1934 pamphlet offers the following words of encouragement for women’s participation in activism of all kinds, including militant activism:

It was women [in fact] who drove the bailiffs out of their homes and the provocative Nazis out of the welfare office. […] In the Ruhr region, proletarian housewives put together a delegation and demanded a pay raise for their husbands in the factories. Women prevented arrests and demanded the release of their husbands. This was the case in Berlin and Breslau, where women snatched an arrested apprentice and market trader from the police. In Berlin, the police were unable to arrest a communist in one factory because the workers threatened to go on strike. In the Rhineland, 40 women went to the district administration office and demanded the release of their husbands. In another place, 60 women and their children forced the release of 40 prisoners through a demonstration. In Freiburg, women achieved the release of a communist woman.42

Such spontaneity was not always welcome within the KPD or even within the RHD itself, which from 1933 onward had been promoting a genuine policy of mass demonstrations. The reopening to women’s activism was, in fact, a necessity, deeply linked to the mass revolutionary movement envisioned by the communist leadership. In a scenario in which, to use the Party’s words, Germany “had been turned into a prison,”43 “mass resistance” was considered the only means by which it would be possible to stop the “degenerateness of this dictatorship,” which through increasingly intense political repression had already set the stage for the “looting and further impoverishment of the working masses.”44 From this perspective, the RHD represented itself as a guiding light capable of leading the masses, even before rousing them to action:

We as Rote Hilfe must show the way to the social democratic workers, showing them how their leaders have betrayed them and how they too are victims of the fascist regime. Our main task must be to make social democratic workers join the RHD, the struggle against fascist terror and active solidarity within a collective discussion.45

The goal of uniting communist-driven anti-fascist resistance efforts (or even some of these efforts) was never reached, however, as recently pointed out by Udo Grashoff, who studied the resistance practices implemented by communists against the Gestapo.46 Despite attempts at coordination, communist women continued to hold spontaneous demonstrations and shows of defiance:

The wives of those arrested went first to the police stations, then to the SA [Sturmabteilung] centers, and finally began demonstrating outside the KLs [Konzentrationslager]. They often brought their children to these protests […] The entire group of women from our committee participated in the funeral of a well-known pediatrician who had been denied treatment because he was Jewish, thus turning that moment into a large demonstration.47

This resilience was also noted by some comrades, as in the case of Georg Bruckmann, who in 1934 noted that women were more effective than most of their male comrades in the strategies they used to pass on information. This observation was confirmed by Mallmann, who shows how women used at least three specific expedients: 1) carrying propaganda leaflets inside strollers; 2) disguising themselves as “mistresses” to distribute information, especially at night; and 3) using sites that were regarded as typical gathering places for women to share information, such as cemeteries and cafes.48

The histories of some RHD committees offer perhaps the most emblematic examples of women’s defiant activism. One could mention, for instance, the issue concerning the “refunding” of the Central Committee (ZV). In 1933, Kurt Bartz, coordinator of the Central Committee of the RHD was arrested. Taking the reins of the ZV was his wife Erna Bartz, who together with Hilde Seigewasser and Maria Lehmann tried to push forward both humanitarian-solidarity activities, such as providing financial aid for the families of political prisoners, and propaganda activities, such as founding a communist newspaper devoted explicitly to women’s issues.49 One could also mention the welfare activities carried out by the Berlin-Tiergarten Committee, where Rosa Lidemann, who was also involved in an array of other activities, coordinated an assistance group for orphans and the children of political prisoners:

Some of our women helped the men whose wives had been arrested by offering assistance in the household and looking after their children. We had contacted over 30 families and alleviated some of the suffering. It was a particular joy for us to hear how happy our comrades in the prisons and penitentiaries were that we were looking after their relatives and caring for them.50

Perhaps the most emblematic case was that of Ottilie Pohl. Pohl, who was Jewish and a long-serving activist, was a member of the Berlin-Mohabit Committee. She had devoted the previous years of her life, up to the time of her deportation in 1942, to assisting the children of those politically persecuted by the Nazi regime. She was arrested the first time in 1940 on charges of aiding an “enemy of the state,” but she was released after only eight months.51 She was subsequently arrested by the Gestapo in 1942 and deported to Theresienstadt, where she died in 1943.52

“The Most Stubborn Enemies”

Rudolf Diels, head of the Gestapo between 1933 and 1934, described communist women as “the most stubborn enemies of the state because they did not become informers despite being tortured.” However, the targeting of communist women was not an immediate goal for the Nazi regime but rather the result of a gradual path toward the construction of a new “enemy of the state.” This propaganda goal was only achieved in late 1935, when Liselotte (Lilo) Hermann was arrested. More than others, Hermann’s case could be read as a real turning point for at least two reasons. The first reason concerns the mother-martyr symbolism. The second concerns the radicalization of Nazi policies against women activists. Hermann was indeed a young mother who was deeply involved in the KPD’s illegal activities.53 After her arrest in December 1935, she was incarcerated for almost two years. She was then put on trial at the People’s Court in Stuttgart, 54 where she was sentenced to death in June 1937. Before 1935, if arrested, communist women were usually given light prison sentences, usually less than a year. Beginning in 1935, however, the sentences imposed on communist women arrested by the Nazi regime increased dramatically, as evidenced, for instance, by the case of Eva Lippold, who was arrested in 1935 and sentenced to nine years in prison.55 But even in this case, there are exceptions, as we have seen in the case of Ottilie Pohl, who, despite being a communist and a Jew, was initially sentenced to an eight-month prison term. One could suggest two possible reasons for the initial “levity” with which the Nazi authorities dealt with communist women. The first involves the simple fact that, as repeatedly pointed out in the discussion here, women’s activism was consistently underestimated. The second is simply the general failure to consider even the possibility that women were political aware and engaged.

From 1935 onward, references to violent acts committed against communist women specifically by the Nazi regime appeared ever more frequently in RHD communiqués. In this regard, the most emblematic documents are those collected in two files, Methods of the Gestapo (Methoden der Gestapo)56 and Terror Against Women (Terror gegen Frauen).57 Both files were compiled by several hands, probably in 1934, and were part of the information that was reported in a series of pamphlets published by MOPR between 1935 and 1936. In these files, we read of how the Gestapo would arrest the wives of dissidents to increase pressure on these dissidents and to limit their sabotage actions.58 The intensification of so-called precautionary measures against communist women was also recorded in the last reports issued by the RHD Central Committee, which sought in its final months to collect as much material as possible concerning political persecution in Germany. One of these reports describes how as many as 193 Communist women were arrested in the early months of 1935.59

After not even two years of Nazi rule, only a few scattered committees of the RHD remained in operation, often run by the wives of the men who until recently had headed them. The more the horizon narrowed and the dark clouds of the regime smothered any attempt at solidarity, the more the goals of the RHD came to seem little more than mirages:

The RHD has the urgent task of organizing aid and protection for the persecuted and organizing reception facilities. Relief for all detainees and victims is a duty for all who reject this barbarism.60

In 1935–1936, these illusions gradually gave way to a bitter realization:

Efforts so far have not been sufficient to organize effective protection and truly comprehensive help for all victims. There are tens of thousands of families who are without aid. There are tens of thousands of prisoners with whom there is no connection and/or communication. […] The situation in Germany requires that the whole problem of protecting all politically persecuted people and their families be considered.61

The latter reports reveal a more intense awareness of the need to create a common humanitarian front, unencumbered by political allegiances, though this awareness, alas, was belated:

In the interest of helping all victims imprisoned behind prison walls and barbed wire, in the interest of helping families deprived of their livelihood, in the knowledge that only together can a dam be built against this terror… The RHD declares itself willing to accept any proposal to be absorbed into such an (all-inclusive humanitarian) organization.62

As the circumstances in Germany made it increasingly difficult for the RHD to remain active, the work of gathering information regarding the conditions of political prisoners was increasingly directed to foreign interlocutors in cities such as Paris, London, Prague, Brussels, Basel, Oslo, and Copenhagen. The intention was to encourage protests in these cities and demonstrations of solidarity with, in particular, the defendants in the trials of the People’s Courts.63 In Paris, for example, several RHD leaders took refuge, organizing in 1935 within the Lutetia Kreis (Lutetia Circle), which was established to promote an international campaign for the release of Rudolf Claus and then, following Claus’ execution, to promote mass demonstrations, efforts which continued until 1937.64 In early 1936, two newspapers in Prague, a city in which KPD leadership had taken refuge, published detailed reports on the developments in two political trials: the Wuppertal Trial65 and the third trial concerning clashes between KPD members and the SA, which took place at Berlin’s Richardstasse.66 A rally led by German women in front of the German embassy was also reported during this period.67 In the summer of 1937, several student and working women’s committees in Basel responded to the call for mass mobilization in reference to the abuses reported in a trial in Stuttgart.68

It seemed for a moment that the long-sought goal of solidarity, which was consistently part of the RHD appeals at the beginning of the “Nazi Era,” had finally been achieved. This proved a fleeting illusion, however, for things had radically changed in Germany, and the few remaining members of the RHD had been silenced and forced to hide their political activism out of fear for their lives. The story of the “Red Caritas,” as it was called by Mallmann, had its final act in 1938, when what remained of the RHD (as an association) was absorbed by the Deutsche Volkshilfe, one of the many humanitarian organizations directly controlled by the Nazi party.

As with many of the moments in the history of the RHD, even in this case the fate of this association was deeply intertwined with the fate of the women who belonged to it and who tried to pursue humanitarian actions against a very hostile backdrop. The RHD ceased to exist in 1938, the year in which Liselotte Hermann was executed on June 20 in the Plötzensee Prison in Berlin.

* The research has been founded by European Union – Next Generation EU, related to the project PRIN 2022, entitled Political Repression and International Solidarity Networks (PRISON). The Transnational Mobilization on Behalf of Political Prisoners in the Interwar Period (1918–1939 ca.) (2022XBMWZ3).

Archival Sources

Bundesarchiv, Berlin

Das Digitale Bildarchiv des Bundesarchives (BILDY)

Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde (BArch)

RY1/3211, Berichte der Zentralvorstandes

RY/3213, Rundschreiben der Zentral Vorstandes (ZV)

RY1/3217, Presse Und Information Material

RY1/3219, Internationale Protests Kampagnen gegen den Terror in Deutschland

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