Little is known about the early stages of psychiatric medicine in France. The eighteenth-century texts collected here show how the principles of a moral and psychological therapy and the institutional measures that contributed to freeing mental illness from the confinement of previous centuries were established.
Keyword: Mental health, history of medicine, medical literature, confinement, eighteenth century, Philippe Pinel, Jean Colombier, François Doublet, Guillaume Daignan, Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis
