Straitjacket

A garment with long sleeves that fasten the arms against the body, used to restrain a violent person. At the end of the eighteenth century it began to replace iron chains.

At Bicêtre, a hospice in Paris, the governor in charge of the mental patients, Jean-Baptiste Pussin, took off the iron chains in 1797 and replaced them with straitjackets. The act was long credited to the physician Philippe Pinel. A record written by Pussin himself, found in 1978, showed that it was his doing^[1].

The chains came off, but restraint itself did not end. The Retreat at York, opened in England at about the same time, made it a rule that neither chains nor corporal punishment were allowed^[2].