Moral treatment

An approach from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that tried to cure mental illness by listening and by working on feelings and thoughts, not by drugs or bodily procedures. "Moral" here does not mean a lesson in right and wrong.

In his "Memoir on Madness" of 1794 the French physician Philippe Pinel stated that mental illness is often curable. He urged physicians to watch the patient closely, ask questions, listen and take notes^[1]. At York in England the Retreat opened in 1796; it used neither chains nor corporal punishment and treated patients, as far as possible, as rational beings^[2].

It was not all gentleness. Fear was sometimes used as a tool, and in Paris the iron chains gave way to the straitjacket^[3].

American hospitals of the nineteenth century reported that nine in ten recent cases were cured this way. When the superintendent Pliny Earle recounted the records in 1877, he found among other things that the same person had been counted as recovered again and again, and the figure shrank a great deal^[4].