Case histories in psychiatvic hospitals and history of medicine as total history

Abstract

  This essay presents the idea of the Hippocratic triangle of the disease, the doctor, and the patients as the basic analytical framework of medical history and shows how to materialize the concept in the reading of patients’ cases of a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo in the early twentieth century. Case histories of the hospital had four basic formats of doctor’s daily notes, nurses’ daily notes, temperature tables, and medicinal prescriptions. Materials created by patients were occasionally incorporated. Those materials help historians to grasp the importance of the Hippocratic triangle and the paper presented some insights about the disease, the police, and the family.