Institutions without History. An Investigation into the Archives of a Private Psychiatric Hospital (France 1930–1950)
Objectives Discovered by following the story of a Parisian patient, l’Hôpital psychiatrique de Saint-Rémy opened in 1937 in the east of France. It is a special institution that was created for profit and in an emergency context during the 1930s. Methods Due to the absence of administrative records, the history of this institution can be written only by using the archives of the Parisian administration and patient records. The story of this special institution allows several issues in the historiography of psychiatry: the funding of mental health, the patient transfers, the revival of the criticism against the psychiatric hospital. Results The creation of this institution in the 1930s corresponds to a specific context of demographic and economic crisis and represents a new mode of management of chronic mental illness. L’Hôpital psychiatrique de Saint-Rémy is a new place of banishment for some populations at the end of the thirties as well as a source of profit for entrepreneurs bound to the most influential political and economic networks of time. Conclusions The history and the archives of the Hôpital psychiatrique de Saint-Rémy inform us about the evolution of the psychiatric assistance but also about the treatment of madness during a difficult time of the history.