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Jacob Levy Moreno, the well-known creator of psychodrama, had a close epistolary relationship with the Spanish psychiatrist Ramón Sarró; a collection of these letters has been located in the Sarró personal archive, deposited in the Library of Catalonia. After locating and arranging this correspondence, we proceeded to analyze and contextualize its contents. The analysis of this collection serves as a basis to outline the context in which the relationship between Moreno and Sarró developed, the role played by certain psychotherapy congresses in strengthening their relationships, and the process that resulted in the University of Barcelona awarding Moreno Doctor Honoris Causa. This study has allowed us to identify certain areas of how psychodrama was received in Spain during the 1960s and reflect on the creation of international collaboration networks and the creation of schools and professional and academic legitimation strategies in the wake of the approaches to group psychotherapy and psychodrama that Moreno developed while based in New York., Project financed by RTI2018-098006-B-I00 - MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and FEDER Support PRE2019-090514 - MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and FSE

The aim of this article is to contribute to the analysis of the origins of psychiatric semiology, which by emphasizing subjectivity in clinical practice, gave birth to psychopathology as the scientific and intellectual enterprise of alienism. In other words, beyond simple anatomical and clinical observation, there was an effort to ‘listen to’ and ‘read’ the patient’s delirium. In essence, the basic thesis which this short paper seeks to defend is that, despite a growing anatomical and clinical mind-set and a clear interest in physically locating mental illness within the body, during the Romantic period, psychiatry was able to construct a semiology largely based on the experience of the ego, on the inner world of the individual. This makes it possible to establish, from a clinical perspective, that the birth of alienism – of psychiatry – must be situated within the framework of a modernity in which the culture of subjectivity was one of its most characteristic features.

[ES] Se analiza el significado del concepto de “obsesión” en el alienismo del siglo XIX. Desde el punto de vista clínico, la descripción de Esquirol fue completada por otros autores (Jules Falret, Legrand du Saulle). En el ámbito de la reflexión psicopatológica, el alienismo francés, con el delirio emotivo de Morel o la psicastenia de Janet, defendió la teoría emocional, frente al trastorno intelectual propuesto por los médicos alemanes. Finalmente, se insiste en la importancia del marco cultural en la aparición de los síntomas obsesivos y de su interpretación. En este sentido, se estudian las relaciones de los escrúpulos religiosos con la melancolía o la aparición de categorías diagnósticas sometidas a los códigos y mentalidades fin-de-siècle., [EN] The article analyses the significance of the concept of “obsession” in nineteenth-century alienism. From a clinical point of view, Esquirol’s description was completed by other authors (Jules Falret, Legrand du Saulle). In the area of psychopathological studies, French alienism, with Morel’s emotional delirium or Janet’s psychasthenia, defended the emotional theory, as opposed to the intellectual disorder proposed by German doctors. Lastly, the importance of the cultural framework is stressed in the appearance of obsessive symptoms and their interpretation. Along these lines, the article discusses the relationship of religious scruples to melancholy or the appearance of diagnostic categories subject to fin de siècle codes and mentalities.

This article examines the influence of the French alienist Alexandre Brierre de Boismont in the first development of the Spanish psychiatric profession during the third quarter of the 19th century. As an outstanding figure of French psychological medicine, Brierre enjoyed great scientific prestige among Spanish doctors, but he also took an active part in promoting and legitimizing the cause of alienism in Spain. For instance, he was involved in projects for the reform or creation of new mental hospitals, supported the admission of some Spanish colleagues into the Société Médico-Psychologique and made a decisive contribution to the social recognition of the professional and medico-legal expertise of alienists in Spain. His case is thus an excellent example of the important role played by international relations and the scientific and professional networks of European alienism in spreading the discourses and practices of the emerging psychological medicine.

We describe a nutritional intervention by the Rockefeller Foundation's International Health Division in Spain after the Spanish Civil War, delineating the relationships between the technicians sent by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Spanish health authorities. We analyze reports of the nutritional situation in Spain in the early 1940s and the design and outcomes of a nutrition survey conducted in a district of Madrid by American and Spanish nutritionists. This nutritional survey, which was based on food intake interviews and was complemented with anthropometric measurements, clinical examinations, and blood tests, found several symptoms and signs of malnutrition. The Rockefeller Foundation's nutritional research was an important historical precedent for later studies made in emergency situations or armed conflicts. Similar surveys have been carried out in the last several decades by distinguished academic departments of public health and epidemiology and by humanitarian aid agencies.

This paper makes a fresh analysis of the work of the French alienist J. E. D. Esquirol. In addition to a critical study of his classifi cation of mental diseases, it analyses his main contributions to semiology: the difference between hallucinations and illusions, etc., and it also places the psychiatric clinic into the context of the so-called anatomoclinical mentality.

During the Spanish civil war, the city of Madrid was subjected to a blockade of food supplies. The hunger among civil population gave rise to conditions comparable to a “hyponutrition experiment similar to what might be done in the laboratory”. This paper analyses the content of nutritional studies (methodology, results, etc.) performed in Madrid between 1937 and 1939. These studies focused on three population groups: the civil population in general, breast-feeding mothers and those suffering from deficiencies. Two types of contributions are identified: the development of a whole technology designed to measure, calculate and evaluate the nutritional status of the population; and the clinical descriptions of various nosological bodies seeking to label and classify the effects of malnutrition; in short, the development of an entire medical know-how (scientific and technological) in times of hunger.

Psychiatric care and mental hygiene in Spain during the 1930s was influenced by the presence of ideological, social, and political polarization. This peculiarity of Spain's history makes it impossible to find more or less uniformed discourses and attitudes in the country. This paper analyzes the eugenic discourse developed by Spanish pro-Fascist psychiatrists, concerning mental and racial hygiene. Some special cases are highlighted that illustrate the situation of the mentally ill during the Spanish Civil War: the evacuation of asylums near the front and the attempt to apply the psychiatric reform promoted by the Second Republic regime.Despite ideological and scientific differences, both mass sterilization of mentally disabled patients and physical extermination of the mentally ill cannot be identified as typical features of Spanish psychiatry, before or after the Civil War.

El presente trabajo pretende averiguar el papel que algunos médicos desempeñaron en el desarrollo de la educación sexual de los niños en la España de los años treinta del siglo XX, prestando especial atención a los acercamientos de inspiración psicoanalítica, por entender que son éstos los más olvidados por la historiografía, tanto médica como general. A través del análisis de las aportaciones de los médicos españoles de la época, que tuvieron más interés por el psicoanálisis (Juarros, Sanchís Banús, Lafora y, sobre todo, Ángel Garma), se estudia la repercusión que los discursos médicos y médico-pedagógicos tuvieron en el marco del Movimiento de Reforma Sexual y, de manera más específica, en el impulso de un cambio de actitud hacia la sexualidad infantil, en sí misma, y en el desarrollo de nuevas propuestas acerca de cómo informar o «aclarar», a los niños, los misterios de la sexualidad., Trabajo realizado en el marco del Proyecto de Investigación BH2002-00588, subvencionado por la Dirección General de Investigación (Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología).

[EN] This article aims to summarise, in the first instance, some of the historiographical trends which have built a “critical” history of psychiatry from the 1960s onwards. Thereafter, it will demonstrate, with suitably significant examples, how methods and discourses were being refined and updated, before reaching a proposal for a new cultural history of psychiatry and subjectivity. In our analysis, special emphasis is placed on the “patient's view”. This renders necessary the task of identifying little consulted sources, such as the writings of the mad, and the incorporation of interdisciplinary hermeneutic tools, including, most notably, those taken from cultural studies and, in particular, written culture. Finally, it will offer a reflection on the epistemic role that this historiographical approach could play in the construction of new ways of understanding mental health, such as that represented by so-called post-psychiatry., [ES] Otra historia para otra psiquiatría. La perspectiva del paciente.- Este artículo pretende revisar, en primer lugar, algunas de las tendencias historiográficas que han configurado una historia “crítica” de la psiquiatría a partir de los años sesenta del siglo XX. Se muestra a continuación, con algunos ejemplos suficientemente significativos, de qué manera los métodos y los discursos se fueron afinando y actualizando hasta llegar a la propuesta de una novedosa historia cultural de la psiquiatría y de la subjetividad. Especial importancia se concede, en nuestro análisis, al “punto de vista del paciente”. Esto obliga a una labor de identificación de fuentes escasamente trabajadas -como los escritos de los locos-, y a la incorporación de herramientas hermenéuticas de características interdisciplinares, entre las que destacan las procedentes de los estudios culturales y, de manera particular, de la cultura escrita. Finalmente, se ofrece una reflexión sobre el papel epistemológico que este enfoque historiográfico puede tener en la construcción de nuevas formas de entender la salud mental, como la representada por la llamada post-psiquiatría.

Este artículo está sujeto a una licencia CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, The aim of this article is to highlight the importance of the history of public health for public health research and practice itself. After summarily reviewing the current great vitality of the history of collective health oriented initiatives, we explain three particular features of the historical vantage point in public health, namely the importance of the context, the relevance of a diachronic attitude and the critical perspective. In order to illustrate those three topics, we bring up examples taken from three centuries of fight against malaria, the so called “re-emerging diseases” and the 1918 influenza epidemic. The historical approach enriches our critical perception of the social eVects of initiatives undertaken in the name of public health, shows the shortcomings of public health interventions based on single factors and asks for a wider time scope in the assessment of current problems. The use of a historical perspective to examine the plurality of determinants in any particular health condition will help to solve the longlasting debate on the primacy of individual versus population factors, which has been particularly intense in recent times., Enrique Perdiguero and Esteban Rodríguez-Ocaña are funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Culture (Research Projects PB97–0782-C03–02 and PB97–0782-C03–01) .