The 19th century saw important events that influenced the history of psychiatry, but the remedies and treatments were often bizarre and even ridiculous, for example, patients in English mental hospitals drank an average of 5 pints (2.8 L) of beer weekly. To treat mental illnesses, they used such, in our modern opinion, merciless measures as removing teeth or removing the clitoris and ovaries in women, treatment with mercury and vomiting. This was the “old” psychiatry: the body was considered the main source of psychological troubles. Concepts of illness were often conditioned by a sociocultural paradigm, such as the disguised moralism of Victorian culture. And ideas about rationality as a defining feature of a person led to the fact that melancholy was considered a lack of motivation and a consequence of irrationality of thinking. In this book, Dmitry Filippov, historian and philosopher, author and editor of the educational project “Psychiatry & Neuroscience,” biasedly cited the most grotesque and absurd examples immaturity of clinical psychiatry of the 19th century, because in extremes and oddities the typical features of the time are more clearly manifested.

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