Bed and bath. Objects and spaces of therapeutic acting in psychiatry of the 19th and 20th century. An outline of a material history of psychiatry

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Heinz-Peter Schmiedebach
• Subject Area: History of Science ; Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2014 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 267215076

At the beginning of the 20th century bed and bath became pivotal objects of therapeutic acting in clinical psychiatries and asylums when bed rest and prolonged bath treatment were introduced. They became medicaments in the proper meaning of the word. Patients should be cured by lying in bed or in bath for weeks and months. These methods of treatment required a rebuilding of psychiatric facilities, they can be interpreted as an attempt to align with hospitals, where both concepts were already proved, and they should enable scientific research to establish a science-oriented psychiatry, based on the surveillance of patients. The psychiatric space that was developed by bed and bath as medical objects as epistemic and therapeutic, is confronted with the space that the patients experienced by the reduction of their activities to bed and bath. On the basis of these treatment methods the project asks for the multilayered functions and ways of appropriation of bed and bath as object and space in the daily routine of psychiatries and for the significance of these concepts in the psychiatric discourse. Bed and bath are conceived as points of intersection, where ways of thinking and acting collide, condense and shift. The sources of the Universitäts-Irrenklinik Heidelberg (patient records, administrative files etc.), whose surveillance wards and facilities for prolonged bath treatment influenced other asylums, are conceived as mainstay of the praxeological analysis. The analysis concentrates on the period between 1890 and 1940, when the concepts of treatment were developed, introduced and detached. Using the example of bed rest and prolonged bath treatment the project aims to outline a cultural studies oriented material history of psychiatry by making use of the epistemic value of objects.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants