---
title: "History of psychiatry"
chunk: 1/4
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_psychiatry"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:00:14.419901+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

History of psychiatry is the study of the history of and changes in psychiatry, a medical specialty which diagnoses, prevents and treats mental disorders.

== Ancient ==
Specialty in psychiatry can be traced in Ancient India. The oldest texts on psychiatry include the ayurvedic text, Charaka Samhita. Some of the first hospitals for curing mental illness were established during the 3rd century BCE.
During the 5th century BCE, mental disorders, especially those with psychotic traits, were considered supernatural in origin, a view which existed throughout ancient Greece and Rome. The beginning of psychiatry as a medical specialty is dated to the middle of the nineteenth century, although one may trace its germination to the late eighteenth century.
Some of the early manuals about mental disorders were created by the Greeks. In the 4th century BCE, Hippocrates theorized that physiological abnormalities may be the root of mental disorders. In 4th- to 5th-century BCE Greece, Hippocrates wrote that he visited Democritus and found him in his garden cutting open animals. Democritus explained that he was attempting to discover the cause of madness and melancholy. Hippocrates praised his work. Democritus had with him a book on madness and melancholy.
Religious leaders often turned to versions of exorcism to treat mental disorders, often utilizing methods that many consider to be cruel and/or barbaric.

== Middle Ages ==

A number of hospitals known as bimaristans were built throughout Arab countries beginning around the early 9th century, with the first in Baghdad. They sometimes contained wards for mentally ill patients, typically those who exhibited violence or had debilitating chronic illness.
Physicians who wrote on mental disorders and their treatment in the Medieval Islamic period included Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi (Rhazes), the Arab physician Najab ud-din Muhammad, and Abu Ali al-Hussain ibn Abdallah ibn Sina, known in the West as Avicenna.
Specialist hospitals were built in medieval Europe from the 13th century to treat mental disorders but were utilized only as custodial institutions and did not provide any type of treatment.

== Early modern period ==

During the early modern period, mentally ill people were often held captive in cages or kept up within the city walls, or they were compelled to amuse members of courtly society.
From the 13th century onwards, sick and poor people were kept in newly founded ecclesiastical hospitals, such as the "Spittal sente Jorgen" erected in 1212 in Leipzig, in Saxony, Germany. Here, those with serious mental problems were isolated from the rest of the community in accordance with contemporary European practice. Also founded in the 13th century, Bethlem Royal Hospital in London was one of the oldest lunatic asylums.
In the late 17th century, privately run asylums for the insane began to proliferate and expand in size. Already in 1632 it was recorded that Bethlem Royal Hospital, London had "below stairs a parlor, a kitchen, two larders, a long entry throughout the house, and 21 rooms wherein the poor distracted people lie, and above the stairs eight rooms more for servants and the poor to lie in". Inmates who were deemed dangerous or disturbing were chained, but Bethlem was an otherwise open building for its inhabitants to roam around its confines and possibly throughout the general neighborhood in which the hospital was situated. In 1676, Bethlem expanded into newly built premises at Moorfields with a capacity for 100 inmates.
In 1621, Oxford University mathematician, astrologer, and scholar Robert Burton published one of the earliest treatises on mental illness, The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up. Burton thought that there was "no greater cause of melancholy than idleness, no better cure than business." Unlike English philosopher of science Francis Bacon, Burton argued that knowledge of the mind, not natural science, is humankind's greatest need.
In 1656, Louis XIV of France created a public system of hospitals for those with mental disorders, but as in England, no real treatment was applied.
In 1713, the Bethel Hospital Norwich was opened, the first purpose-built asylum in England, founded by Mary Chapman.