The Rise of Mental Health Nursing: A History of Psychiatric Care in Dutch Asylums, 1890-1920

Mental health nursing emerged as a new occupational field in the late nineteenth century in the context of the rise of scientific psychiatry. Based on new understandings of mental illness and new forms of psychiatric treatment, asylum physicians legitimized and initiated the introduction of mental nursing in asylums, which restructured a field of work that had hitherto been the domain of lay attendants. In light of the new significance that skilled nursing care had acquired in the context of general hospital reform, psychiatrists, themselves a rising professional group, argued that more refined and better trained personnel would greatly improve psychiatric care. Shifting social and gender relationships, particularly the changing social position of middle-class women, constructed and shaped mental nursing. The emergence of mental nursing mirrored larger social changes for lower middle- and working-class men and women and their work illustrates the social complexity of the care of the mentally ill.