A democratic program for healing: The Raspail domestic medicine method in 1840s France.

Raspail's domestic medicine method, popularized in 1840s France, has similarities with the practices of nineteenth century non-academic healers. His mass marketing of camphor as a universal treatment echoes the practices of "charlatans" and their circles. But Raspail is also very original in this history of popular care. As a scientist, a popularizer of encyclopedic knowledge and a political activist, he managed to blur traditional distinctions between science and politics and between popular and learned medicine. Raspail was a constant thorn in the side of academic institutions and professional organizations, which were struggling to gain legitimacy. His work took a political turn when he combined, within a single project, his approach to treatment and his call for democratizing medical care. Raspail's method challenged institutional norms by acknowledging the importance of the patient's contribution to the healing process, and recognizing the necessity of thwarting the occasionally deleterious effects of monopolistic medicalization.

[Institutions without History. An Investigation into the Archives of a Private Psychiatric Hospital (France 1930-1950)]. / Des institutions privées d'histoire. Enquête sur les archives d'entreprises capitalistes dédiées à la gestion de la folie (France, 1930-1950).

Objectives Discovered by following the story of a Parisian patient, l'Hôpital psychiatrique de Saint-Rémy opened in 1937 in the east of France. It is a special institution that was created for profit and in an emergency context during the 1930s.Methods Due to the absence of administrative records, the history of this institution can be written only by using the archives of the Parisian administration and patient records. The story of this special institution allows several issues in the historiography of psychiatry: the funding of mental health, the patient transfers, the revival of the criticism against the psychiatric hospital.Results The creation of this institution in the 1930s corresponds to a specific context of demographic and economic crisis and represents a new mode of management of chronic mental illness. L'Hôpital psychiatrique de Saint-Rémy is a new place of banishment for some populations at the end of the thirties as well as a source of profit for entrepreneurs bound to the most influential political and economic networks of time.Conclusions The history and the archives of the Hôpital psychiatrique de Saint-Rémy inform us about the evolution of the psychiatric assistance but also about the treatment of madness during a difficult time of the history.

Introduction. Towards a Contemporary Historiography of Amateurs in Science (18th­20th Century).

The last few decades have seen considerable growth in the role played by amateurs in the sciences. With the development of new techniques for collecting information, new virtual networks and the emergence of new problematics calling for the participation of citizens, this role has also become more visible, while the modern boundary between professionalism and amateurism, first erected in the 19th century, has been shaken. These contemporary developments have changed our perspective on amateurs in science and brought forth questions and analyses that sometimes coincide with recent inflections in the history of science. Thus it is now possible to take a new approach to the historical study of amateurs in contemporary science. This introduction hopes to demonstrate this, while the essays brought together in this volume, some of which explore extreme cases, reveal the very relative nature of the definition of the "amateur" category and how complex and fertile its implementation has been in the history of science.

[How the Feast of Corpus Christi at the psychiatric hospital of Sarthe became a historical event]. / Comment la Fête-dieu de l'hôpital psychiatrique de la Sarthe est devenue un événement historique.

Can the historian, passionate about archives, build a historical narrative based mainly on the memories of nurses? Could the caregivers, who are themselves players in the history of psychiatry write it? When the former hears the individual accounts of the latter, history is written. The history of the Feast of Corpus Christi at the psychiatric hospital of Le Mans.