Welcome to europeanjourneys.org
This website documents four journeys made by nineteenth-century psychiatrists of northern Europe in the years of relative peace between the Napoleonic Wars and the Crimean War. These journeys were a small part of the lively intellectual and cultural exchange that gave birth to psychiatry as a branch of modern Western medicine.
In particular, the journeys bear witness to
- the collegiate character of the emergent psychiatric profession,
- the growth of interest in the architecture and design of hospital buildings,
- an increasing sophistication in psychiatric diagnosis and treatment, and
- a growing discomfort with the confinement, restraint and abuse of patients, resulting in the widespread adoption of policies of moral management and non-restraint in European asylums.
The four journeys were made by
- Alexander Morison of London and Edinburgh in 1818,
- Joseph Guislain of Ghent in 1838,
- Bernard Everts of Noord-Holland in 1847, and
- Daniel Hack Tuke of York in 1853
You can browse the histories of the institutions Morison, Guislain, Everts and Tuke visited on these journeys (or mentioned in passing without visiting), and the accounts they wrote of their visits, or conduct a free-text search of this material.
Updated: [13 September 2006]