Forbes Winslow and his Journal

Abstract

During the 19th century, there were few periodicals dedicated to the inchoate discipline of alienism (now called ‘psychiatry’). Given the newness of alienism and the idiosyncratic structure of the British publishing industry at the time, for a private individual to start a new specialized journal was a major enterprise. Against all odds, Forbes Winslow managed to publish his journal from 1848 to 1860, and during this period the scholarly nature of his publication could not be matched by the Asylum Journal, the official publication of the Association of Medical Officers of Asylums and Hospitals for the Insane.

Under the title Psychological Medicine, Winslow offered a new view of alienism which he clearly conceived as a discipline broader than medicine. He strove to inform his readers about the conceptual and practical complexities that then (as now) beset and besiege the care of the mentally ill. He taught his readers that to understand and manage insanity, knowledge of philosophy and of the human sciences was as important as knowledge about the brain. In the 1850s this was a new message to impart.