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