Question: Peter what interests you about the hospital records from the 1850's?

Peter Kinderman answered on 13 Mar 2020:

In 1845, whenever anyone was admitted to a ‘Lunatic Asylum’ (sorry about the term), the law required a summary of why they had ended up in that state, the details of their life, in great detail and in language that everybody could understand. By 1930, that had turned into a single alphanumeric code – D4 or E3 – for ‘aetiological factors’.
I’m interested in how we moved from a broadly social model of mental health to a biomedical approach… whether that represents medical progress, or whether we’ve lost something important in the process.