Irina E. Sirotkina

This article explores the development of Russian psychiatry in the late 19th — early 20th centuries, focusing on such specific types of psychiatric practice as sanatoria and clinics for neurotics. The abundance of those institutions is interpreted as an evidence of the change in the very conception of mental disease by the turn of the century, whereby the range of diseases susceptible of psychiatric treatment enlarged so as to embrace, e. g., «nervous weakness» and «overstrain». The novel private institutions provided favorable conditions not only for the patients, but also for the doctors: the psychiatrists who worked there could develop their concepts and uphold their ways of teatment more freely than it was possible within the precincts of the existent public Hospitals.