http://www.todayfocus.cn/plus/view.php?aid=936
"Hell Hospital" is adapted from Poe's short story "Therapy of Dr. Taal and Professor Fessel", The novel was written in 1845. Since it is a short story, the plot is not complicated-a doctor in a big city, drop by to visit a psychiatric hospital famous for its unique treatment methods, without locking up the patients and allowing them to move around freely, the more doctors The more things went wrong, after a crazy dinner, the real doctors and nurses rushed out. It turned out that the people receiving him were all mental patients, and the real doctors were locked up.
This novel was originally shocking at the time, because before the nineteenth century, the West treated mental patients very badly. They basically did not treat them as human beings, and no one thought that mental patients might rise up and imprison normal medical care.
Before the Middle Ages (approximately AD 476~AD 1453), people believed that the cause of madness was external, such as being cursed and the soul out of the body, so they used rituals such as witch doctors and prayers to ask the gods to remove the impure body or recall the soul.
By the end of the Middle Ages, the lunatics were miserable. At that time, medicine was controlled by theology and religion. Mental patients were regarded as possessed by the devil, and they were punished by torture, burning and other tortures. The Middle Ages was the darkest era in the history of Western mental health. In 1692, in the North American colony of Salem, Massachusetts, some young girls suddenly had muscle cramps and hallucinations. The locals believed that this was because the wizards had caused them to possess demons, so a special court was set up to search for and try people who looked like wizards. In order to save their lives, those arrested are forced to admit that they are wizards and expose people around them to show that they "abandon evil and do good." For a time, the locals were in danger, even husbands and wives exposed each other, children reported their parents, and "drawing lines" between family members continued to happen. At most, more than 200 people were imprisoned. In the end, 20 people were involved in this huge and powerful event. He was put to death during the "Exorcism" movement. It sounds more terrifying than we did during the Cultural Revolution.
Later, the Renaissance, the rise of the Industrial Revolution, and great progress in science, mental illness was finally treated as a disease that needed treatment, but the treatment of mental patients was still not much better. At the beginning of the 18th century, patients with mental disorders were regarded as incurable inferior people in Europe. The psychiatric hospitals for patients with severe mental disorders even became places for high-ranking officials to hunt for fun. According to reports, at the Bethlehem Mental Hospital in London at that time, for only a few pennies every weekend, you can watch the various abnormal behaviors of people with mental disorders like watching a circus show.
After the French Revolution, Pinel (P. Pinel, 1745-1826) was the first doctor to be appointed as the director of the "lunatic asylum". He removed the chains and shackles from the mental patients, freed them from their life-long prison life, and turned the "lunatic asylum" into a hospital. But patients are still not treated as adults. Just like the beginning of "Hell Hospital", when university professors give lectures to students, mental patients are just a class prop. A gentle and gentle professor with a white beard can show the students in order to induce the patient's convulsions, and even put his hands into her lower body in public.
With the development of medicine and technology, doctors continue to want to completely cure mental illness. In 1935, Dr. Egas Moniz of Portugal and his assistant performed a "prefrontal lobe resection" on a female patient. The operation significantly reduced the patient’s aggressive behavior and became obedient but permanent. It destroys the basic personality of the patient and causes other more serious problems. In the medical world, the "prefrontal lobe resection" has now been abolished. Movie fans will think of this operation in "Flying Over the Cuckoo's Asylum". This is what Murphy was performed. The movie let everyone see the horror of this operation, but people did not realize it at the time, Moniz The doctor subsequently performed similar operations on 13 other patients, and Moniz was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine that year.
After talking about the West for a long time, let's look at how we Chinese treat lunatics. In ancient China, there was no institution such as a lunatic asylum, and there was no record of persecuting lunatics. However, a law can be found that means "lunatics hurt people and their families suffer." In traditional Chinese clan society, the place to accommodate lunatics is still theirs. Family. It seems that we in the East are more humane towards lunatics than in the West, but it’s hard to say, what if we don’t have a home? Older people must have seen madmen wandering on the street when they were young, and they may have to fend for themselves like that without a home.
Back to "Hell Hospital", Poe's novel was very avant-garde at the time, because he used literary techniques to smooth out the difference between lunatics and normal people. Of course, lunatics are lunatics in the end. However, after this "Therapy of Dr. Taal and Professor Fessell" has been put on the screen many times, the lunatics are becoming more and more normal. Smart, by the time "Hell Hospital", the lunatics have become geniuses, although they are lying geniuses, playing around with normal people. Of course, this shot is to make it look better, but it also clearly shows that modern society is more and more tolerant of lunatics and heretics. There are more and more books trying to clarify that there is only a thin line between genius and lunatic. I think this is also a bit extreme. After all, there are indeed many lunatics who can hurt people.
In "Madness and Civilization", Foucault said: It is impossible to find madness in a wild state. Madness can only exist in society. It will not exist outside the form of feeling that separates it, outside the form of repulsion that both repels it and captures it. Therefore, we can say that from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, madness appeared in the social field as an aesthetic or daily phenomenon; in the 17th century, due to confinement, madness experienced a period of silence and rejection. It has lost the function of showing and revealing that it had in the time of Shakespeare and Cervantes, and it has become false and ridiculous. Finally, in the 20th century, the madness was put on a collar and classified as a natural phenomenon, tied to the truth of this world. This kind of positivist crude appropriation resulted from the condescending fraternity that psychiatry showed to the madman on the one hand, and the passion of protest that can be found in the poems from Naivar to Aalto on the other. This kind of protest is an effort to restore the experience of madness to the profound and powerful enlightenment that was destroyed by confinement.
The above words are very confusing for the sake of accuracy. Here I want to give a simple and crude explanation-the history of madness is a history of human nature being persecuted by civilization.
View more about Stonehearst Asylum reviews
