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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.

The paper describes two case studies of patients with anorexia nervosa who suffer from auditory hallucinations as the only psychotic symptom. A review of the literature regarding clinical cases of anorexic patients with hallucinations is discussed. Hallucinations in anorexic patients are conceptualized according to different theoretical models which point to a dimensional view of eating disorders., (Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and Eating Disorders Association.)

This paper studies the introduction of the new physical therapies in the years prior to the Second Spanish Republic. It concludes that the physical treatments in force in the international literature were introduced early in Spain and were put into practice by the most important psychiatrists, although in few cases. Given the generalized criticism on the efficacy of psychiatry as a specialty, there was a general bias towards a positive evaluation of the efficacy of the physical therapies by the new generation of Spanish psychiatrists that did not occur in other countries of our setting. The psychiatrists who disagreed professionally with the above-psychiatrists opposed this tendency, there not being sufficient empirical support for the opinion of any group.