Historical materials about medicine and medical care include official historical documents and private documents. The official documents and private documents have different characteristics, as follows, and therefore exhibition situations also differ. Official documents include historical and legal documents of the administration of a medical facility, such as the former and public hospital, the sanatorium. Personal documents include personal information, such as personal test results and experimental data. The historical materials that I used when I studied the Hansenʼs Disease policy shaped this reportʼs attention to the directionality of the history of medicine, medical care studies and the relation of historical documents.

This article introduces “case histories” of psychiatric hospitals, a genre of resources that has not been utilized in Japan by historians of psychiatry. The features of this genre of material and the possible ways of its use will be discussed. The archives of Ohji Brain Hospital（1901­-1945），now housed at the Komine Institute in Tokyo, will be the particular focus of this work, and from its diverse materials, the case histories of individual patients will be analyzed. Thus far, case histories have been mainly exploited in Anglo­American psychiatry history, and this new type of material has transformed Anglo­American historiographies. Therefore, this paper presents the results of applying the two new major research methodologies that have developed in Britain and North America, namely the quantitative analysis of the demography of the patients and the qualitative examination of the power of the therapeutics given in the hospital.