Authors

Discussion

The late eighteenth century and the early decades of the nineteenth century saw the rise of the (custodial) mental asylum in several countries of Europe, among them some regions of the Habsburg Monarchy. In Hungary, however, the first private and subsequently state-funded asylums were established well into the nineteenth century. Until then, the place of the mentally ill was subject to debate in the country, and even though the first plans to establish a mental asylum for the Kingdom of Hungary emerged as early as the 1790s, the early history of Hungarian psychiatry is characterized by failed attempts. The presentation aims to explore how this debate unfolded in the early nineteenth-century Hungarian medical community through debates reflecting on the practical necessity of establishing a specialized institution and the concepts proposed for treatment. From the early 1830s, when the first Hungarian-language medical journal (Orvosi Tár) was launched, and subsequently, with the establishment of the Royal Pest Society of Physicians and the Society of Hungarian Physicians and Naturalists, a more intensive debate began on handling the problem that brought up several dilemmas. And even if the actual plans to establish an asylum in Hungary were not realized immediately, the opinions and arguments formulated throughout these discourses played a significant part in a long phase of preparation for psychiatric institutionalization.