Sankt Hans Hospital

Facts

The mental cure technique

By Inger-Marie Børgesen, Museumsleder, etnolog (22 stories)

With the appointment of chief physician Johan Henrik Seidelin, in 1816 Sankt Hans Hospital (St. John’s Hospital") came to be regarded as a dedicated psychiatric hospital. Before then, the institution admitted a mixture of plague victims, the poor and the insane, until in the late 1600s its common name of "Plague House" was replaced with the latter-day name of Sankt Hans Hospital. The institution was located in Copenhagen until 1908 when it moved to the Bidstrupgaard estate near Roskilde. Seidelin introduced improvements in diet and hygiene, but also the so-called "mental cure technique". The cure consisted of disciplining the mentally ill in restraining chairs and straitjackets, or subjecting them to sudden, unexpected events in the belief that the shock would arrest the mental illness. "

Partly a public place

Selected entry

Through darkness into light" "

Story written by Inger-Marie Børgesen

Time / Periode 1816

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And then I was led down several long corridors to a chamber – a cell…In this cell I was undressed, sedated, confined and abandoned without the care of a nurse, without so much as a glass of cold water, alone with my illness and my anxiety…finally one night – I awoke with a start, and as I sat up to plump my pillow, I read on the pillow case by the light of the gas lamp outside the initial letters of "St. Hans Hospital" and in an instant I comprehended all – my gruesome plight – only by the Grace of God did I not in that instant become insane with terror". The Danish philanthropist, Regitze Barner, on her brief stay at the Sankt Hans Hospital in 1899. "