The paper addresses the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century practices of care for the mentally ill in the Hungarian hospitals of the Brothers of Mercy, highlighting the connections between illness and poverty and the approaches towards the mentally ill in a period when new means of clinical treatment and specialized care were underway. The order settled in Hungary in the middle of the seventeenth century to provide care primarily for poor people. They were traditionally specialized in the care of the mentally ill, and even though standardized care and systematic therapeutic regime were not yet in existence in this period, the practice of registering and sectioning the “insane” within general hospitals is already detectable.Besides recording information about the social background of the patients, the surviving documents (patient statistics, registries and regulations) provide a glimpse into how mental illnesses were labelled and classified in the hospital. In addition, they also contain references to sectioning the “insane” and their classification based both on social and financial status, and on their mental state.Using documents of hospital administration and narrative sources reflecting on the daily routine of the hospital (such as newspapers, medical topographies, and travelogues), the study discusses medicalization and the practice of specialized care through the examination of a severely marginalized and stigmatized subgroup of hospital patients.

Nincs absztrakt.

Analysing theoretical approaches and pragmatic proposals found in literature of law enforcement and health administration, the study examines the contemporary theory of and approaches to the care for people living with an infirmity of either mind or soul. The overview also takes into account the English model, which was considered exemplary at the time, as well as concepts found in the references of German-language works and in Hungarian health administration-related texts. Special emphasis is placed on the contexts which these texts deploy, such as questions of poverty and discipline, the most frequently discussed topics, symptomatology, as well as the terms and speech modes used to describe the patients and their condition. Further questions concern whose remit healthcare was thought to be at the time, where mental health patients belonged within institutionalised caregiving, and what the actual and/or idealised image of these institutions was like in health administration and enforcement texts. The study scrutinizes contemporary pragmatic healthcare solutions by surveying theorists’ attitudes and answers to these questions – each coming from their own respective disciplines.