I actually saw this short on television back in the 1960s, and never forgot about it. Dr. Philippe Pinel was an early doctor (from France) who handled the inmates of asylums. In the 18th Century the average mental doctor or alienist (one did not call them psychologists or psychiatrists yet - there was no real psychiatry) treated the mentally ill as though they were only slightly better than a criminal. Dr. Benjamin Rush, for example, was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and a leading physician and spokesman for American democracy - but his invention to assist the mentally ill was an isolation - style device that sealed the patient in total darkness. It was not to cure the patient, but to so isolate him or her as to shut the patient up! Pinel did something that showed a fine spirit and originality - he treated his patients as though they were sick human beings. He did not chain them to chairs or beds or walls. He used kindness and simple acts of normality to remind the mentally ill how to react to proper behavior. It was rudimentary psychiatry, but compared to what was going on around the world it was light years ahead of anyone else.
Pinel got his position due to the favoritism of aristocrats who knew him in France. In 1793, a mob of Revolutionaries chased Pinel in the streets of Paris to kill him as a typical aristocratic stooge (this was not unusual during the Revolution - the great chemist Lavoisier was sent to the guillotine because he had been one of the Farmer Generals of the Revenues in the Ancien Regime, and Fouquier Tinville (his prosecutor) supposedly said "The Revolution has no need for scientists!" as they took him away; also the mathematician Condercet, a leading Girondist, committed suicide when facing a similar fate by the Jacobins).
Pinel was cornered by the mob, when a respectable elderly man came over and started attacking members of the mob with his cane. The mob members fled, and the man took Pinel into a building to recover. It turned out the man was one Hector Chevigny, the first man that Pinel's treatment of decency helped recover his sanity.
It was an interesting study of one of the first steps towards modern treatment of the insane.
Pinel got his position due to the favoritism of aristocrats who knew him in France. In 1793, a mob of Revolutionaries chased Pinel in the streets of Paris to kill him as a typical aristocratic stooge (this was not unusual during the Revolution - the great chemist Lavoisier was sent to the guillotine because he had been one of the Farmer Generals of the Revenues in the Ancien Regime, and Fouquier Tinville (his prosecutor) supposedly said "The Revolution has no need for scientists!" as they took him away; also the mathematician Condercet, a leading Girondist, committed suicide when facing a similar fate by the Jacobins).
Pinel was cornered by the mob, when a respectable elderly man came over and started attacking members of the mob with his cane. The mob members fled, and the man took Pinel into a building to recover. It turned out the man was one Hector Chevigny, the first man that Pinel's treatment of decency helped recover his sanity.
It was an interesting study of one of the first steps towards modern treatment of the insane.