Benoît Majerus

Writing the history of psychiatry in the 20th century

As editors of the special issue, we try to summarize here the historiographic trends of the field. We argue that the field of research is accommodating the diversity of the institutional, social and political developments. But there is no narrative in sight which can explain the psychiatry of the 20th century, comparable to the authoritative coherence achieved for the 19th century. In contrast, the efforts to extend these narratives to the 20th century are largely missing the most impressive transformation of psychiatric treatment — and self-definition.

The introduction of chlorpromazine in Belgium and the Netherlands (1951–1968); tango between old and new treatment features

The introduction of chlorpromazine in Belgium and the Netherlands demonstrates an intriguing tango between old and new treatments. Chlorpromazine, marketed by the French company Rhône Poulenc entered psychiatry as an adjunct to existing therapies. Instead of promoting chlorpromazine as a revolutionary therapy, we see early efforts to market Largactil as a supplement to the armoury of psychiatric treatments. These marketing efforts matched the idiosyncrasies of national and local styles and cultures. Despite continuities with earlier therapeutic developments, we support the notion of a therapeutic revolution. In the early sixties supply and demand provoked a turn towards more standardized therapeutic regimes.

Making Sense of the 'Chemical Revolution'. Patients' Voices on the Introduction of Neuroleptics in the 1950s.

The so-called chemical revolution has produced a vast historiographical corpus. Yet the patient’s voice remains surprisingly absent from these stories. Based on the archives of the Institut de Psychiatrie (Brussels), this paper traces the introduction of Largactil as recounted in patient letters, physician records and nurse notes. The paper thus contributes to the history of therapies from below, but also participates in the historiographical debate about whether the introduction of neuroleptics can indeed be considered a revolution.

Revisiting psychiatry in twentieth-century Europe

A new, very critical history of psychiatry emerged in the 1960s in the aftermath of the publication of four quite distinct but nevertheless related books by Ronald David Laing, Erving Goffman, Thomas Szasz and Michel Foucault. Their contributions were without any doubt only a symbol of a much larger structural shift in the societal position towards psychiatry. The 1960s and 1970s experienced an extremely controversial debate on madness and the different meanings that could be attributed to it. Social sciences in general and history in particular were but one actor in a much broader discussion. And even if Mark S. Micale and Roy Porter have convincingly argued that the traditional Whig narratives were generally more valuable than how they were normally represented, the Fab Four and especially Michel Foucault’s Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique of 1961 did change the way the history of medicine in general and of psychiatry in particular was written. This book, as well as several later publications on the same topic, not only became a bestseller in their home countries, but also had a worldwide circulation through numerous translations. And even today most historical studies of psychiatry still refer to