title: The treatment of madness in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: discourses about curability in Spanish mental health care, 1890-1917.
abstract: This article studies the discourses about curability constructed by Spanish mental health practitioners in the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. While in the 1870s and 1880s the predominant discourse promoted by doctors attached to private institutions was extremely optimistic, it subsequently changed and became more pessimistic regarding treatment outcomes. However, given phrenopathists' professional needs, they continued to profess more or less unshakeable confidence in the therapeutic abilities of psychiatry. The reception of new nosologies, such as Kraepelin's, depended in part on contemporary mental health practitioners' stance on curability and was accompanied by ambivalence.
authors.affiliation: Profesor, Departamento de Medicina/Universidad de Valencia. jplumed@terra.com.
authors.forename: José Javier Plumed
authors.initials: JJ
authors.lastname: Domingo
authors.affiliation: Profesor, Departamento de Medicina/Universidad de Valencia. Departamento de Medicina/Universidad de Valencia. Avenida Blasco Ibáñez, 13 46010 - Valencia - España. luis.rojo@telefonica.net.
authors.forename: Luis Miguel Rojo
authors.initials: LM
authors.lastname: Moreno
mesh_terms: D049672:History, 19th Century; D049673:History, 20th Century; D016304:Hospitals, Private / Q000266:history; D006778:Hospitals, Psychiatric / Q000266:history; D006801:Humans; D001523:Mental Disorders / Q000266:history* / Q000628:therapy; D011570:Psychiatry / Q000266:history*; D013030:Spain