Mediators of Knowledge between Marginality and Mobility: Ludwig Gumplowicz
and the Making of Italian Elite Sociology

Kornel Trojan

Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Research on Consequences of War, Graz

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 15 Issue 1 (2026): 3-29 DOI 10.38145/2026.1.3

This article examines how Ludwig Gumplowicz’s trajectory from Krakow to Graz mediated between his Polish-Galician experiences and the emergence of Italian elite sociology. It argues that Gumplowicz’s sociology developed along a periphery-center-periphery path: first shaped in the conflicted milieu of Krakow, then institutionalized in Graz as part of the German-speaking academic heartlands of the Habsburg Empire, and finally reexported to the Italian-speaking Küstenland and to what was later to become a unified Italy, where it was appropriated and transformed by early elite theorists such as Gaetano Mosca and Roberto Michels.

Conceptually, the article refines center-periphery approaches by treating them as heuristic and relational rather than as fixed hierarchies. So-called peripheries appear not as passive recipients but as centers of circulation in their own right. Italian students in Graz emerge as key cultural and scholarly mediators: through their mobility, translations, and professional networks, they carried Gumplowicz’s conflict sociology southward and helped recast it into Italian elite sociology.

Empirically, the article reconstructs the multilingual, mobile university landscape of the late Habsburg Empire and traces how patronage, academic travel, and journal networks enabled the southward transfer of ideas about sociology. In doing so, it contributes to debates on transnational intellectual history, the history of sociology, and Habsburg university history, using the case of Gumplowicz to show how regional universities and student mobility played a disproportionate role in the “viral,” adaptive circulation of concepts.

Keywords: Ludwig Gumplowicz, Italian elite sociology, conflict sociology, knowledge transfer, center-periphery, Habsburg Empire, academic mobility, Roberto Michels

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We Cannot See Ourselves Reflected in All Italian Institutions”: Reform Psychiatry, Habsburg Legacies, and Identity-Making in the Upper Adriatic Area

Francesco Toncich

Department of Humanities, University of Trieste

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 14 Issue 4 (2025): 615-654 DOI 10.38145/2025.4.615

This article analyses the development of criticisms of psychiatric institutions and restraint-based treatments for psychiatric and neurological patients as a foundation for identity-making processes in the Upper Adriatic from a long-term perspective. Between the 1960s and 1980s, the region, which was once part of the Habsburg Empire but was by then divided between Italy and Yugoslavia, became a hub for the deinstitutionalization of a psychiatric system still burdened by its Fascist legacy. This reform fostered renewed identity-making within local society, rooted in early Habsburg-era psychiatry. As early as the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Austrian psychiatry in this region had embraced non-restraint and outpatient therapies based on the liberal idea of modernity, which exerted a lasting influence on the psychiatric institutions in Trieste and Gorizia. World War I and the dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy brought Italian rule, under which Fascism transformed psychiatry into a tool of repression, eradicating alternative treatments and creating a clash between psychiatric cultures. This clash became foundational to the development of an identitarian model, rooted in Habsburg nostalgia and a presumed local “tradition” of alternative psychiatry during periods of profound crisis and transformation, particularly the reforms in the institutional world of psychiatry in the 1960s–70s.

Keywords: deinstitutionalization of psychiatry, non-restraint, Upper Adriatic region, Habsburg psychiatry, Fascist psychiatry

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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

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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

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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

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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

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