School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemMind, mania and science: psychiatry and the culture of experiment in mid-twentieth century Victoria( 2002)Psychiatry developed from the practices of nineteenth century medical practitioners based in asylums, transforming itself by the second half of the twentieth century into a specialty operating from many more places and equally concerned with temporarily disturbed “normal” people as with individuals with intractable conditions or an intellectual handicap. By the middle of the twentieth century, psychiatry in Victoria, Australia, was the site of a vigorous debate about the nature of mental illness and the appropriate way to investigate it according to the precepts of science. Using archival materials and patient records, I examine efforts by three competing schools of psychiatric thought - the biological, social and psychotherapeutic - to align themselves with scientific medicine via several emerging fields, including clinical trial research. I suggest that the biological school had an initial edge and I explain in what form academic and religious support was forthcoming for it. I also consider the influence of celebrated Melbourne psychiatrist, John Cade, whose research on lithium influenced the alignment process. The struggle for science's imprimatur was crucial to psychiatry's transition during the twentieth century. Having once been detached from medicine's main currents and remote from the community gaze, it gained increased recognition within the field of medicine. This transition was not without some cost however. In learning how to re-invent their care, study and treatment of people with disordered mentality, psychiatrists chose to privilege certain sorts of knowledge and to downgrade aspects of their healing art.