This book provides the first comprehensive study of the history of Hungarian psychiatry between 1850 and 1920, placed in both an Austro-Hungarian and wider European comparative framework. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the book captures the institutional worlds of the different types of psychiatric institutions intertwined with the intellectual history of mental illness and the micro-historical study of everyday institutional practice. It uncovers the ways in which psychiatrists gradually organised themselves and their profession, defined their field and role, claimed expertise within the medical sciences, lobbied for legal reform and the establishment of psychiatric institutions, fought for university positions, the establishment of departments and specialised psychiatric teaching. Beyond this story of increasing professionalization, this study also explores how psychiatry became invested in social critique. It shows how psychiatry gradually moved beyond its closely defined disciplinary borders and became a public arena, with psychiatrists broadening their focus from individual patients to society at large, whether through mass publications or participation in popular social movements. Finally, the book examines how psychiatry began to influence the concept of mental health during the first decades of the twentieth century, against the rich social and cultural context of fin-de-siècle Budapest and the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy.

Written in honour of eminent historian Roy Porter by twenty of his colleagues and students, the collection renders cutting edge scholarship accessible. Historians from the three fields that Porter made his own - the histories of medicine, madness, and the Enlightenment - illustrate his influence while tackling major themes ranging from disability rights to the popularization of science. In their accounts, artisan gardeners jostle with anarchists, dentists, and hypnotists in a lively, and very Porterian, parade.

Paths out of the Apocalypse uses violence as a prism through which to investigate the profound social, cultural, and political changes experienced by (post-) Habsburg Central Europe during and immediately after the Great War. It compares attitudes toward, and experiences and practices of,physical violence in the mostly Czech-speaking territories of Bohemia and Moravia, the German-speaking territories that would constitute the Republic of Austria after 1918, and the mostly German-speaking region of South Tyrol. Based on research in national and local archives and copious secondaryliterature, the study argues that, in the context of total war, physical violence became a predominant means of conceptualizing and expressing social-political demands as well as a means of demarcating various notions of community and belonging. The authors apply an interdisciplinary understandingof violence informed by sociological and psychological theories as well as by rigorous empirical historiographical approach. First, they examine the most severe kind of physical violence - murder - against the backdrop of shifting scientific and media discourses during the war and its immediateaftermath. Second, the authors use numerous cases of collective violence, ranging from less serious everyday conflicts to massive hunger demonstrations and riots, to unravel its 'language', thus deciphering the attitudes and values shared among an ever-growing group of perpetrators. Paths out of theApocalypse thus fundamentally rethinks some key topics currently debated in the scholarship on early twentieth-century Central Europe, the First World War, violence, nationalism, and modern European comparative social and cultural history.

Psy-sciences (psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, pedagogy, criminology, special education, etc.) have been connected to politics in different ways since the early twentieth century. Here in twenty-two essays scholars address a variety of these intersections from a historical perspective. The chapters include such diverse topics as the cultural history of psychoanalysis, the complicated relationship between psychoanalysis and the occult, and the struggles for dominance between the various schools of psychology. They show the ambivalent positions of the "psy" sciences in the dictatorships and authoritarian regimes of Nazi Germany, East European communism, Latin-American military dictatorships, and South African apartheid, revealing the crucial role of psychology in legitimating and "normalizing" these regimes. The authors also discuss the ideological and political aspects of mental health and illness in Hungary, Germany, post-WW1 Transylvania, and Russia. Other chapters describe the attempt by critical psychology to understand the production of academic, therapeutic, and everyday psychological knowledge in the context of the power relations of modern capitalist societies.

This volume presents the ideas of the main actors of the political scene in the Hungarian Kingdom during the long 19th century (1790-1920). Organised around key political thinkers, the book considers the most significant paradigms of thought associated with these figures and the critical political events of the day. Beginning with an introductory overview of 19th-century Hungary in a European context, which includes the main features of Hungarian political thought, 19th-Century Hungarian Political Thought and Culture explores the fundamental characteristics of the country's political system and the geopolitical background to political discourse in the region at the time. The contributors reflect on the stories of some of the most influential voices, as well as their networks, impacts and legacies. Through this, the book is able to offer novel insights into how Western political culture was perceived and adapted in a country long considered by many to belong to the European periphery.

Throughout human history illness has been socially interpreted before its range of meanings could be understood and disseminated. Writers of diverse types have been as active in constructing these meanings as doctors, yet it is only recently that literary traditions have been recognized as a rich archive for these interpretations. These essays focus on the methodological hurdles encountered in retrieving these interpretations, called 'framing' by the authors. Framing and Imagining Disease in Cultural History aims to explain what has been said about these interpretations and to compare their value.