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MENTAL HEALTH IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

Hungarian Psychiatry,
Society and Politics
in the Long
Nineteenth Century
Emese Lafferton
 Mental Health in Historical Perspective

Series Editors
Catharine Coleborne, School of Humanities and Social Science,
University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW, Australia
Matthew Smith, Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare,
University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK
Covering all historical periods and geographical contexts, the series
explores how mental illness has been understood, experienced, diagnosed,
treated and contested. It will publish works that engage actively with
contemporary debates related to mental health and, as such, will be
of interest not only to historians, but also mental health professionals,
patients and policy makers. With its focus on mental health, rather than
just psychiatry, the series will endeavour to provide more patient-centred
histories. Although this has long been an aim of health historians, it has
not been realised, and this series aims to change that.
The scope of the series is kept as broad as possible to attract good
quality proposals about all aspects of the history of mental health from
all periods. The series emphasises interdisciplinary approaches to the field
of study, and encourages short titles, longer works, collections, and titles
which stretch the boundaries of academic publishing in new ways.

More information about this series at

https://link.springer.com/bookseries/14806
 Emese Lafferton

Hungarian Psychiatry,
Society and Politics
in the Long
Nineteenth Century
Emese Lafferton
Department of History
Central European University
Vienna, Austria

ISSN 2634-6036 ISSN 2634-6044 (electronic)

Mental Health in Historical Perspective
ISBN 978-3-030-85705-9 ISBN 978-3-030-85706-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85706-6

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
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Cover illustration: Psychiatric Art Collection of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
To Lili and Beni, the centres of my universe, without whom this book would
have appeared a decade earlier.
To my Mother and Father, with the deepest gratitude.
 Acknowledgements

This book is long overdue. Many things postponed the completion of

an old project: the vicissitudes of temporarily anchored post-doc life, the
exploration of new academic cultures, the preparation for courses and
other teaching duties at different universities, the irresponsible straying
away to novel research areas, and eventually the arrival of children. But
at last, triumphant over the COVID pandemic with isolation, online
teaching and home-schooling, the book is finally out. Now I wish to
acknowledge institutions that made this possible and thank those indi-
viduals who helped me or offered their invaluable friendships throughout
my long journey.
I am greatly indebted to the three supervisors who helped the work
which formed the basis of this book. Sadly, two of them are no longer
with us. I am forever grateful to Roy Porter who accepted me as his super-
visee as an unknown student from Hungary, based on a single paper I sent
him and he liked. Thanks to him, I spent a year at the Wellcome Insti-
tute for the History of Medicine in London where I fell in love with the
history of medicine and science. His guidance and support were invalu-
able. After Roy’s death, the two people who helped my work are the late
John Forrester with his curiosity and zeal for anything related to the mind
and Susan Zimmermann—now wonderful colleague at Central Euro-
pean University—with her intellectual scrutiny and sensitivity to issues
of inequalities.

vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Wellcome Trust generously funded my post-doc fellowship

(RG35883) I spent at the Department of History and Philosophy of
Science at the University of Cambridge. I then continued as a lecturer at
the Science Studies Unit at the University of Edinburgh before I returned
to Budapest with a Marie Curie Fellowship and eventually became a part
of the faculty at my alma mater, the Central European University (since
then the university was expelled from Hungary for political reasons and
re-settled in Vienna).
From all these years, I want to thank many valued friends and
colleagues for inspiring me through conversations, the discussion of parts
of my work, organising workshops, planning courses or research, offering
help in difficult times, or just being there to have a sip of wine at the right
moment. These include: Martin Edwards, Sharon Messenger, Chandak
Sengoopta and Natsu Hattori from the year in London; Jim Secord,
Martin Kush, Nick Hopwood and Hubertus Jahn who were greatly
supportive over my years in Cambridge; Wendy Faulkner, Steve Sturdy,
Robin Williams, Ivan Crozier, Anna Greenwood, John Henry, Emma
Frow and Isabel Fletcher, who proved to be nice colleagues in Edinburgh,
and James Wood and João Rangel de Almeida from the fantastic group of
Ph.D. students there without whom my time in Edinburgh would have
been far less colourful and enjoyable; Andreas-Holger Maehle, Matthew
Eddy and Lutz Sauerteig from Durham University where I spent a short
research fellowship. I am also grateful to other colleagues and friends
from different places and times, including: László Perecz, Mónika Nagy,
Mónika Perenyei, Kati Evans, Robert J.W. Evans, Mitchell Ash, Sonia
Horn, Deborah Coen, Anna K. Maerker, Simon Werrett and Andrew
Zimmerman.
I would also like to acknowledge and thank the assistance of librar-
ians and archivists at different institutions, including the Széchényi
National Library, the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences,
the Central Statistical Office, the (already closed) Library and Archives
of the Lipótmező National Mental Institution, the Library of the Clinic
of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the Semmelweis Medical University
in Budapest, the Josephinum in Vienna and the Wellcome Library and
the British Library in London. A great deal of my original research was
conducted at the Semmelweis Library and Archives of the History of
Medicine in Budapest, one of the most beautiful, cosy and intimate small
libraries with an incredibly helpful and friendly group of librarians and
historians of medicine. I wish to thank them, especially Lívia Kölnei,
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix

Katalin Kapronczay and László András Magyar for their warm and helpful
attitude and great knowledge they were willing to share.
I am grateful to my current colleagues at the Central European
University for a wonderful environment to work in, but especially Nadia
Al-Bagdadi, Matthias Riedl, László Kontler, Gábor Klaniczay and Balázs
Trencsényi, who trusted and supported me at crucial moments in my
career. I owe many thanks to Ádám Mézes who helped with the notes,
text, images and bibliography of the manuscript with his soothing calm-
ness and offered company at the lonely and tiresome last phase of clearing
it.
I feel fortunate to have a wonderful group of friends who have
provided unceasing support, inspiration and camaraderie over decades by
now. Ágnes Csonka, Sarah Dry, Tatjana Buklijas and Gayle Davis have
remained great friends and comrades as well as examples of successful
female scholars or intellectuals with families and children. I am indebted
to Simon Schaffer for his inspiration, encouragement and help over many
years. As people who know him can tell, history and research are much
more fun if one can share it with him. Finally, I am deeply grateful to
Viktor Karády, the most generous person I know both as a scholar and as
a friend, for his time, helpfulness, wisdom and invaluable pieces of advice
on both text and life. It is beyond my capacity to ever return his help.
At last, I wish to thank my family, my brother Zsolt Lafferton and
my sister-in-law, Barbara Ottó for their support and patience. I dedicate
this book to my two young children, Lili and Beni, who had to suffer an
often-stressful mother over the past months but who will hopefully one
day appreciate this work. And to my parents, who raised me in the most
caring and safe environment and who let me go far, freely, to find my own
path, never stopping supporting me. I am grateful for their love.
Two articles and a book chapter were formerly published from this
project. For shorter versions of Chapters 7 and 8, see: “What the Files
Reveal. The Social Make-Up of Public Mental Asylums in Hungary,
1860s–1910s,” in ‘Moderne’ Anstaltspsychiatrie im 19. und 20. Jahrhun-
dert - Legitimation und Kritik (Medizin, Gesellschaft und Geschichte—
Beiheft 26). Ed. by Heiner Fangerau and Karen Nolte, 83–103. Stuttgart:
Franz Steiner Verlag, 2006, and “The Hygiene of Everyday Life and
the Politics of Turn-of-the-Century Psychiatric Expertise in Hungary” in:
Psychology and Politics: Intersections of Science and Ideology in the History
x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

of Psy-Sciences. Ed. by Anna Borgos et al., CEU Press, Budapest—New

York, 2019, 239–254. For the book chapter, see: “From Private Asylum
to University Clinic: Hungarian Psychiatry, 1850–1908,” in Framing
and Imagining Disease in Cultural History. Ed. by George S. Rousseau,
Miranda Gill, David B. Haycock, and Malte Herwig, 190–213. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
 Contents

1 Introduction 1
2 Histories of Psychiatry and the Hungarian Model 19
The Self-Image of Late-Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry 19
Histories of European Psychiatry 23
The World Without Psychiatry 23
Therapeutic Asylums and Moral Treatment 28
Academic Research and Biological Psychiatry 33
The Hungarian Model 35
Care for the Insane in Hungary from the Late-Eighteenth
to the Middle of the Nineteenth Century 37
Medical Teaching and Professional Forums 47
Boom in Psychiatric and Medical Institutions
(1860s–1920) 58
Modern Scientific Research and Professionalisation
(1870s–1920) 67
3 The Bourgeois Family World of the Private Asylum:
The Schwartzer Enterprise from 1850 101
The Schwartzer Dynasty 102
The Private Asylum 104
Pólya’s Asylum 104
Schwartzer’s Asylum 105

xi
xii CONTENTS

Laboratory of the Human Body and Soul: Schwartzer’s

Comprehensive Theory of Mental Illness in Context 109
Enlightenment and Romantic Traditions in the Culture
of Austro-Hungarian Medicine 110
Aetiology of Mental Illnesses in Schwartzer’ Theory 116
The Therapeutic Asylum 126
Physical Treatment 126
Moral Treatment 128
Doctor and Patient 131
Conclusion: The Schwartzer Psychiatric Enterprise 135
4 The Kingdom in Miniature: Public Mental Asylums
from the 1860s 147
Asylum Life Under Four Directors, 1868–1920 152
Life Conditions, Nursing and Treatment 152
The Use of Coercion and Restraint 160
Legal Regulation Versus Reality of Admission, Discharge
and Guardianship in Asylums and Psychiatric Hospital
Wards 165
Medical and Bureaucratic Criteria and Conditions
of Admission 166
The Double System of Admission and Guardianship 171
5 The University Clinic and the Birth of Biological
Psychiatry. Academic Research, Teaching and Therapy
from the 1880s 193
Self-Perception. Teaching and Research in the Making
of the Psychiatrist 194
The Medical Context of Nineteenth-Century Scientific
Psychiatry 196
Károly Laufenauer and the Establishment of the Department
of Mental Health and Pathology and Its Related Clinic 201
Laufenauer’s Observation Ward and the Mad Strangler
at Saint Roch Hospital 204
The Split and Move of the Clinic 211
Academic Research by Károly Laufenauer and Károly
Schaffer 213
Neuro-Anatomy, Neuro-Pathology and Brain-Histology 213
Hypnosis Studies 220
 CONTENTS xiii

The Integrative Function of the University Clinic

in a Fragmenting Profession 226
6 Fragmenting Institutional Landscape. Alternatives
of Specialised Institutions, Colonies and Family Care
on the Turn-of-the-Century 245
The Relationship of Academic and Asylum Psychiatry 245
Old Problems, New Ways. Alternatives to the Mental Asylum 249
“Annex Asylums” 251
Family Care and Colonies 254
Small Specialised Institutes for “Imbeciles” and “Idiots,”
Epileptics, Alcoholics, Nervous Patients, and Criminals 263
7 Asylum Statistics and the Psycho-Social Reality
of the Hungarian Kingdom 291
Social Parameters of Asylum Populations 296
Gender and Age Distribution 296
Marital Status and Religious Affiliation 303
Religion 305
Social and Professional Status 308
The “Medical Parameters” of Asylums 313
Problematic Taxonomy 313
Admission Categories of Mental Disorders 318
Discharges 319
8 Invading the Public and the Private: The Hygiene
of Everyday Life, Shell-Shock and the Politics
of Turn-of-the-Century Psychiatric Expertise 329
Shifts in the Social Functions of Psychiatry by the Turn
of the Century 329
Degeneration, Social Problems and Prophylactics 330
Neurasthenia or Nervous Exhaustion 332
Paralysis Progressiva and Female Emancipation 334
Alcohol Problems, Class and Crime 337
Darwinism, Lamarckism and Elements of Eugenic
Thinking 340
Shell Shock and Traumatic Neurosis 344
Artúr Sarbó and the Theory of Micro-Structural Changes 346
Ernő Jendrássik’s Degenerationist Understanding of War
Neurosis 347
xiv CONTENTS

Viktor Gonda’s “New Electroshock Therapy”

at the Rózsahegy Hospital 349
Sándor Ferenczi and the “Discovery of the Psyche”: The
Psychoanalytical Approach 352
9 Conclusion 369

Bibliography 385
Index 423
 List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Bath-house at Schwartzer’s Private Mental and Nerve

Institution (Photo) (Ottó Babarczi Schwartzer, Prospect
der Privat-Heilanstalt für Gemüths und Nervenkranke
zu Budapest [Budapest: Druck von Viktor Hornyánszky,
1897]) 106
Fig. 3.2 Garden scene at Schwartzer’s Private Mental and Nerve
Institution (Photo) (Babarczi Schwartzer, 1897) 108
Fig. 3.3 Garden scene at Schwartzer’s Private Mental and Nerve
Institution (Photo) (Babarczi Schwartzer, 1897) 129
Fig. 4.1 Front picture of the Buda State Mental Asylum
(Lipótmező) (Graphics) (Source Lipót Grósz, Emlékirat
a hazai betegápolási ügy keletkezése, fejlődése, s jelenlegi
állásáról , különös tekintettel a betegápolási költségekre
[Memoir Concerning the Birth, Development and Present
State of Our National Patient Care] [Buda: Magyar Királyi
Egyetemi Nyomda, 1869]) 148
Fig. 4.2 Ground-plan of the Buda State Mental Asylum
(Lipótmező) (Graphics) (Source Grósz, 1869) 150

xv
 List of Tables

Table 2.1 Number of students enrolled at the Pest Medical

Faculty and Hungarian medical students at the Viennese
Faculty, 1820–1850 49
Table 2.2 Increase in number of beds, patient admission
and Budapest’s population, 1873–1899 60
Table 4.1 The turnover of the nursing Staff at Lipótmező
in the year 1895 157
Table 5.1 Patient admissions and discharges at Laufenauer’s
observation ward at Saint Roch Hospital in 1885
and Krafft-Ebing’s observation ward in Graz in 1887 205
Table 7.1 Annual admission and average daily number of patients
at Lipótmező Public Mental Asylum (1868–1904) 297
Table 7.2 Gender distribution of patients treated in the asylums
in the observed period 298
Table 7.3 Age distribution of patients at admission compared
to the population of Hungary by gender 300
Table 7.4 Age distribution of mental patients and paralytics
at admission compared to the population of Hungary
by gender above 15 years of age 300
Table 7.5 Age distribution of mental patients excluding paralytics
at admission compared to the population of Hungary
by gender above 15 years of age 302
Table 7.6 Marital status of patients in mental asylums as compared
to the general population (in per cent) 304

xvii
xviii LIST OF TABLES

Table 7.7 Mental patients by religion in Dualist Hungary

as compared to the total population of the country
(in per cent) 306
Table 7.8 Denomination of patients in the Nagyszeben Asylum
(1863–1913) compared to that of theTransylvanian
population (in per cent) 307
Table 7.9 Social status of patients admitted to the Schwartzer
Asylum (1850–1864) 309
Table 7.10 Social status of patients admitted to the Budapest Private
Mental and Nervous Institutes during 1853–1885
(in per cent) 309
Table 7.11 Hungarian mental patients in the dualist period
by professional status (in per cent) 310
Table 7.12 Occupations of women patients in Lipótmező
with independent income (in numbers) 312
Table 7.13 Distribution of patients suffering from various
mental illnesses in the Schwartzer Asylum by gender
(1851–1863) 315
Table 7.14 Patient admission broken down by disease forms
at Lipótmező and Nagyszeben Asylums 316
Table 7.15 Proportion of paralytics among male patients
at Nagyszeben broken down for decades 318
Table 7.16 Discharges in the various mental asylums 319
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The beginning of the breakdown of our old political world, among other
things also of the Globus Hungaricus, is deeply injuring our narcissism. It
is a good thing that one has a Jewish and a psychoanalytic ego along with
the Hungarian, which remain untouched by these events.
(Sándor Ferenczi to Sigmund Freud, 4 October 1918)

“Globus Hungaricus” (in the words of the Hungarian psychoanalyst

Sándor Ferenczi) nicely recalls “globus hystericus,” the name given to a
psychiatric disorder accompanied by the symptoms of difficulty in swal-
lowing and a sense of suffocation. Some political and social facts of the
pre-1918 old regime, such as growing national movements of the ethnic
minorities, anti-Semitism and social conflicts following speedy urbanisa-
tion and poverty were perhaps just as difficult to swallow for the citizens
of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy as was its collapse, a collapse which
Freud and Ferenczi anticipated in their long correspondence from the
very start of the First World War.
The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy’s old world was a crucible of
psychology, social theory and artistic ferment. Marked by decadence,
political crisis and social disintegration, it was nevertheless a place where
much of modern art and thought were born. But if Central Europe is in
many ways the geographic unconscious of the modern mind, Hungary is
certainly the repressed other in histories of psychiatry and culture. While

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
E. Lafferton, Hungarian Psychiatry, Society and Politics in the Long
Nineteenth Century, Mental Health in Historical Perspective,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85706-6_1
2 E. LAFFERTON

the Viennese achievements are well-studied and appreciated, Budapest

was also a place of extraordinary intellectual blossoming and artistic inno-
vation, far less emphasised in this context. The limited focus on Vienna
and on Freud’s “discoveries” not only conceals the roots of psychoanal-
ysis by obscuring the mental asylum and a variety of other psychiatric/
psychological projects, but also dismisses Budapest and other Central
European cities’ own modernist achievements as well as the salience of
the Habsburg dilemma1 shared by both Austria and Hungary. A detailed
history of Hungarian psychiatry in the long nineteenth century will thus
offer novel insights into the Central European crisis and its unique impact
on culture and science.
This monograph provides the first comprehensive study of the history
of Hungarian psychiatry between 1850 and 1920 placed in both an
Austro-Hungarian2 and a wider European comparative framework. The
geographic focus of my original research falls on the distinctively multi-
cultural Hungarian Kingdom then inhabited by more than a dozen ethnic
groups and encompassing territories now belonging to Romania, Serbia,
Croatia, Austria, Slovakia and Ukraine, in addition to Hungary.
With a uniquely interdisciplinary approach, the book captures the
institutional worlds of the different types of psychiatric institutions inter-
twined with the intellectual history of concepts/theories of mental illness,
and the micro-historical study of everyday institutional practices and
doctor-patient encounters specific to these institutions. It grasps the ways
in which psychiatrists gradually organised themselves and their profession,
defined their field and role, claimed expertise within the medical sciences,
lobbied for legal reform and the establishment of psychiatric institutions,
fought for university positions, and for the establishment of departments
and specialised psychiatric teaching. All of these were central to their claim
for disciplinary integrity, cultural authority, and the monopolisation of
medical knowledge and power over their clientele.
Yet this story is more than one of increasing professionalisation; it also
captures how psychiatry became invested in social critique. It shows how
psychiatry gradually moved beyond its closely defined disciplinary borders
and increasingly became a public arena. Psychiatrists extended their
professional expertise, originally focused on the individual person and the
psychiatric patient population, to the larger social domain, encompassing
crowds, masses, cities and the nation. They did this through publications
on grave social problems mostly of the urban milieu, such as alcoholism,
prostitution, crime, poverty, but also on the impact of industrialisation,
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

of modern lifestyle and the exhaustion of one’s vital powers, written for
an audience much broader than the medical profession. They also gave
popular science talks and participated in popular movements concerning
public health issues, such as eugenics or the temperance movement.
Parallel to this development, psychiatry also gradually invaded the private
sphere of healthy people by constructing what a healthy mental, phys-
ical, spiritual and sexual life consists of, laying emphasis on prophylaxis.
As a result, psychiatry attained a cultural monopoly over the “hygiene
of everyday life” as well as the factors contributing to the “health” of
society by the first decades of the twentieth century. This shift in the
role of psychiatry is discussed in the rich cultural and social context of
fin-de-siècle Budapest and the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy.
Therefore, beyond contributing to psychiatric history by exploring
complex longue durée developments in a hitherto unstudied region, this
book connects and enriches other areas of study as well. These include the
cultural and social studies of fin-de-siècle modernity in Central Europe
and the wider scholarship on the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Habsburg
studies). Studying turn-of-the-century Hungarian psychiatry in the wider
social, cultural, scientific and political context of the Austro-Hungarian
Dual Monarchy invites an alternative to the genealogy of Central Euro-
pean modernism offered by Carl Schorske in his influential Fin-de-Siècle
Vienna: Politics and Culture.3 Schorske’s discussion of psychoanalysis in
the context of Viennese art, literature and culture at the time of the crit-
ical reformulations and subversive transformations of Austrian traditions
explained the fin-de-siècle preoccupation with the psyche and the bour-
geois cultivation of the self. The concentration on the psychological and
the aesthetic was the result of the intelligentsia’s move away from politics
marked by a decline of Austrian liberalism and rationalism and the rise
of right-wing ideologies. Viennese modernism thus meant a retreat from
the political, into the psychological realm, decadence and introspection.
This provided the context for psychoanalysis to develop and become the
theoretical or conceptual basis of modernism. Schorske used the image of
the “garden” for this Vienna, both as a real blossoming garden of the city
space and as the metaphorical garden of the psyche, both of which needed
cultivation and provided shelter or refuge from the disturbing public and
outer forces.
In his book The Garden and the Workshop,4 Péter Hanák already argued
for a need to extend this limited focus on Vienna to other cities of the
Dual Monarchy when discussing Central European modernism, above all
4 E. LAFFERTON

to Budapest. Hanák thus complemented the picture of Vienna as a “gar-

den” of esoteric culture with the image of Budapest as the “workshop,”
using Hungarians’ own notions of the brilliant centres where the intelli-
gentsia gathered and immersed in creative activities: the editorial offices
and cafés, and we might add the baths, too. Hanák thus contrasted Vien-
na’s aesthetic and individualistic culture with Budapest’s more moralistic
and socially engaged approach.
It is precisely this moralistic and socially occupied culture of Budapest
through which Hungarian psychiatry engaged with the public world and
which it actively shaped at the turn of the century. While the revolu-
tionary cultural movements in Central Europe were a reaction to the
common social and political crisis that eventually led to the Monarchy’s
disintegration, Austrian and Hungarian responses emerged from deeply
different civic cultures and political traditions. If the liberal—rational
worldview was speedily fading and giving place to the irrational and
apocalyptic in Vienna by the turn of the nineteenth century, Budapest
saw a last important strengthening of liberalism in the 1890s and had
a period of two decades marked by bourgeois radicalism that brought
progressive forces to the fore before the First World War. If Viennese
intellectuals, in the midst of their identity crisis, retreated from politics
into the realm of the aesthetic and the psychological, Budapest intellec-
tuals at the same time did an opposite move: they pervaded the social
and public sphere and worked on progressive solutions in response to
the specific Hungarian problems they perceived. Science and art here
became public achievements, public and communal means to heal social
problems. The traditional dynastic state-patriotism of the Austrian bour-
geoisie can be contrasted with the modernist progressivist approach of an
exceptionally multi-ethnic group of emerging radical intellectuals (with
a very strong Jewish component) coming from the ranks of doctors,
psychiatrists, sociologists and demographers, among others. Finally, if
Viennese intellectuals’ main preoccupation focused on safeguarding the
universal rights and liberties of the autonomous individual, the Hungarian
bourgeoisie was more deeply anchored in the national (and nationalist)
sentiment.
By extending Schorske and Hanák’s terrain of cultural history and
exploring the social role of late-nineteenth-century psychiatry and related
medical and social disciplines, this book seeks to provide new insights into
modern nationalism and major cultural innovations of the European fin
de siècle.
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

∗ ∗ ∗

While there is a wealth of literature in the history of psychi-

atry5 which focuses on specific institutions, practitioners, periods and
geographic areas, more general longue durée approaches to national
histories of psychiatry are much fewer in number. More general histories
of English, French, and German psychiatry were written for instance by
Ian Dowbiggin, Jan Goldstein, Eric Engstrom and Andrew Scull. Such an
approach has the advantage of demonstrating both the synchronic embed-
dedness of psychiatric institutions, practices, and practitioners in the
political and social milieu that surrounds them as well as the diachronic
interplay of traditions and culture.
In this respect, the Hungarian situation provides a compelling test
case in the study of psychiatric history. Due to the relatively small scale
of psychiatric institutionalisation and the brief period during which the
processes took place in Hungary, its historian may offer a detailed yet
systematic and comprehensive picture of the wide-ranging psychiatric
institutions and trends, an account which seems almost impossible in
other national contexts. The Hungarian case becomes a heterogeneous
though contained experimental object for the study of the long-term
exchanges between psychiatry, culture and social history. No doubt part of
the significance and appeals of this material is that for so many contempo-
raries, and for their historians, it was precisely this set of exchanges which
seemed generative of cultural modernity in Europe.
Concerning Hungarian historiography of psychiatry, but also more
generally of medicine and science, this book utilises modern approaches
and perspectives and hence hopes to contribute to a field slowly trans-
forming in the current years. Retrospective accounts on the early history
of psychiatry by late-nineteenth-century Hungarian psychiatric profes-
sionals read as rather optimistic today.6 The “psychiatric project” was
embedded in the victorious story of scientific progress, rapid social devel-
opment and strengthening humanism. As a part of the larger scheme of
nation-building, psychiatry was praised as instrumental in the elevation
of the nation to the level of civilised European states. Historical scrutiny,
and indeed, even some contemporary psychiatrists’ sharp criticism of their
profession’s achievements, however, tend to undermine whiggish claims
of humanitarianism and the myths of unbroken institutional and thera-
peutic progress. Power without knowledge was illusory, manifest not only
in psychiatry’s admission of the elusive nature of mental illness and the
6 E. LAFFERTON

impenetrability of mental processes, but also in the hard facts of the high
mortality and dismissal rate of “uncured” patients from lunatic asylums, or
in the not negligible condition that psychiatry was still largely marginal in
both the medical and social spheres in the nineteenth century compared
to the social status and influence it gradually acquired by the early decades
of the twentieth century. The book thus reconstructs the early history of
Hungarian psychiatry fraught with tensions over progress and therapeutic
failure, over great institutional designs and financial constraints, and over
the claimed mission and actual force of the psychiatric profession.
The main, traditional hub of current Hungarian medical history7 is the
Hungarian Society of Medical History 8 located at theSemmelweis Museum,
Library and Archive 9 in Budapest. Their main publication outlet is the
journal Orvostörténeti Közlemények [Communicationes de Historia Artis
Medicinae]. The major strength of the journal is the publication of
historical data and primary sources: places, dates, names and documents
related to the biographies of famous as well as lesser-known medical prac-
titioners, teachers and researchers and to medical institutions, such as
hospitals, university faculties and learned societies. Needless to say, these
contributions are extremely useful for further research. In general, the
studies of the journal are overwhelmingly descriptive and less oriented
towards analysis and methodological considerations. Critical reflections
on the challenges that have emerged in the social sciences as well as in
science studies since the 1970s are especially lacking. Analyses situating
the history of medicine within social and economic history, investigating
the history of the body or the construction of medical knowledge feature
much less prominently as compared to approaches of a longer-standing
tradition, such as more narrowly focused “biographies” of “great heroes,”
institutions and modern disciplines.
Apart from a few influential historians of an older generation, many
of the practitioners of this more traditional style of medical history
are archivists or come from a medical background. Promisingly, a new,
younger generation of scholars is now also emerging who are able to
combine primary source-based research with a more self-reflective and
critical approach. They are not numerous and are institutionally scattered,
working at different university departments, for instance, the Depart-
ment of Philosophy and History of Science at the Budapest University
of Technology and Economics or the departments of history at Central
European University (recently moved to Vienna, but still with sizable
cohort of Hungarian students) and the ELTE University. Nevertheless,
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

students from these centres are expected to produce historical works in

the coming years on various topics which would be fully conversant with
western scholarship and will eventually transform the field in Hungary.
While there is no comprehensive treatment of the more narrow field
of psychiatric history in the observed period, there are topics, institu-
tions or famous practitioners which attracted scholarly attention from
different quarters. The most marked and well-researched area is the study
of Hungarian psychoanalysis and the work and life of its world-famous
practitioner, Sándor Ferenczi and other psychoanalysts known mostly only
in Hungary. One needs to single out an early history on the relation-
ship of Freud and Ferenczi and the rise and fall the Budapest school
written, in the 1980s, by the psychiatrist Pál Harmat living abroad,
which still stands as the most usable and comprehensive historical anal-
ysis on the topic.10 The most prolific writer with a historically sensitive
approach is the late psychologist Ferenc Erős, whose relevant short mono-
graphs, edited volumes and especially articles are just too numerous to
collect here.11 From a more interdisciplinary perspective, Csaba Pléh has
written numerous monographs and articles on the history of psychology
in the West as well as in Hungary.12 One needs to mention the work
of another psychologist, Judit Mészáros as Ferenczi’s biographer,13 and
from a younger generation of scholars, the work of the psychologist Júlia
Gyimesi on Ferenczi and spiritualism.14 There are numerous useful publi-
cations of sources and articles related to psychoanalysis and Ferenczi in the
online journal of the Imágó Egyesület (Imágó Society of psychoanalysis
in living society and culture) together with the former journal Thalassa
(published since 1990).
Concerning the more narrowly defined history of psychiatry, the
psychiatrist Ferenc Pisztora needs to be singled out as the author of arti-
cles on a range of topics in nineteenth-century psychiatry (he is cited in
the relevant chapters) together with the social psychologist Melinda Kovai
for her more systematic work on the entanglements between psychology,
psychiatry and politics during state socialism (1945–1970).15 As noted
already, all of these authors, without exception, are with their primary
background in psychology or psychiatry.
Given the lack of comprehensive or even specialised reference works,
this book is based on very extensive primary research. I draw on the
abundant primary material of contemporary published sources of various
kinds as well as unpublished material. These include: unpublished old
asylum files, admission and discharge registers, statistics, original patient
8 E. LAFFERTON

records and case histories, personal archival holdings of scientists, as well

as published scientific journals, treatises and books, etc. A systematic
review of one-half of a century production of the two main medical
journals Orvosi Hetilap (Medical Weekly) and Gyógyászat (Medicine),
together with the subsequently published Természettudományi Közlöny
(Natural Scientific News), Egészség (Health), Klinikai Füzetek (Clinical
Papers) and the documentation of the Royal Pest Society of Physicians as
well as of the National Alienist Congresses give a sense of what priorities
characterised mental health care, how these shifted over the period and
how new professional concerns arose. Journal articles and comprehen-
sive mental pathological textbooks demonstrate how the understanding
of mental disorders changed due to professional, institutional and scien-
tific factors, as well as how the doctor-patient relationship transformed
during the observed period.
The most valuable original source for this study consists of patient files
containing almost 3,000 case histories between 1868 and 1915 in the
Lipótmező Royal National Lunatic Asylum in Budapest and some others
in the provinces. These files allowed an unprecedented systematic survey
and the complex analysis of sociological and pathological parameters of
the population of mental patients in major asylums in the Hungarian
Kingdom over half a century: the reconstruction of the country’s hospi-
talised mental patient population in terms of nationality, religion, culture
and language as well as socio-professional status throughout the entire
observed period. Such an analysis is particularly fruitful in the light
of Hungary’s unique conditions among contemporary European nation
states due to her marked multi-ethnic and multi-denominational char-
acter. These archival sources also allowed the qualitative analysis of aspects
of asylum life which are unrecoverable from published literature.

∗ ∗ ∗

Concerning the structure of the book, in Chapter 2, Psychiatric Histo-

ries and the Hungarian Model, I provide an overview of the history of
care for the mentally ill in the Hungarian Kingdom in the period from the
late-eighteenth century to the end of the First World War. The chapter
captures a world without psychiatry prior to the establishment of the first
viable private madhouse by Ferencz Schwartzer in 1850 and explores the
available forms of care for the mentally ill, in particular the role of folk
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

medicine and church relief, home cures and unorthodox healers. It exam-
ines attempts by the churches to monopolise care for the insane, early
forms of state custodial care and the patterns of private provision for “the
mad.” It then summarises the chief tendencies in psychiatric institution-
alisation and knowledge production in the second part of the nineteenth
century that form a framework for the specific institutions, psychiatrists
and practices discussed in detail in the following chapters of the book.
These main trends are placed in the context of various models of Euro-
pean psychiatric history offered by an abundant scholarship in the past
decades.
Crucially, the Hungarian model of psychiatric institutionalisation
suggests idiosyncratic features concerning timing, periodisation and
magnitude. Custodialism (the provision of custodial, rather than
medical/therapeutic care in different institutions) marking the prehistory
of psychiatry appeared on a small scale in Hungary until the middle of the
nineteenth century, while the early custodial lunatic asylum phase char-
acteristic in Western countries is clearly non-existent in the Hungarian
Kingdom. The first viable mad house appeared at a time when the reform
of the custodial asylum was largely over and the therapeutic asylum already
had an almost one-half century history in Italy, France, England and some
German states. This is not simply a delay, but rather a complete lack of a
phase compared to general European trends of psychiatric institutionalisa-
tion. Despite initiatives by the centralised state, concerning the quality of
care in a country with few healing institutions and little access to physi-
cians, care for the insane was primarily the responsibility of the family
and the local village or parish community until the middle of the nine-
teenth century (and even beyond). In addition, sources suggest that in
Hungary, unlike in other national contexts, one cannot speak about a
monopolisation of the care for the insane by the church either, and the
private provision for the insane in mental institutions also did not become
a significant pattern until 1900 and beyond.
In the following three chapters, I study distinct types of institu-
tions: the small private madhouse, the large public asylum and the
university psychiatric clinic, together with their operational and thera-
peutic/research practices and underlying ideological discourse. I show
how these separate institutions embodied distinct forms of life and cogni-
tive universes. Marked by different conceptions of space and time, healing
10 E. LAFFERTON

and other practices, and views of the psychiatrist’s function, these institu-
tions framed different perceptions of mental illness and reflected different
ideas of doctor-patient relationship.
Chapter 3, The Bourgeois Family World of the Private Asylum. The
Schwartzer Enterprise from 1850 explores the intellectual climate of early
Hungarian psychiatry and the everyday world of Ferencz Schwartzer’s
private lunatic asylum. Initiated at the time of political repression
following the Hungarian war of independence in 1849, Schwartzer’s
private psychiatric enterprise is placed in the context of the therapeutic
asylum and moral treatment. His comprehensive theory of mental illness
(presented in the first Hungarian book of its kind) demonstrates an expert
knowledge informed by different medical, neurological and psychological
traditions, including a form of humoral pathology embraced at the time
in both Viennese and Pest16 medical circles, elements of Enlightenment
dynamic-vitalism and neurology and of Romantic psychiatry. With an
idiosyncratic combination of these traditions, Schwartzer came up with a
remarkably holistic view of the human being complemented with a refined
psychology and managed to conciliate the oppositions between organicist
and psychic approaches as well as to claim special expertise within the
medical community for the alienist trained in mental pathology.
Everyday asylum life and the institute’s operational machinery are
recaptured through arresting case studies of patients. The whole idea of
the asylum as a therapeutic tool, together with moral (psychic) and phys-
ical treatment, was aimed at the systematic re-education and reorientation
of the individual back to his or her family and society at large. Framed as
a family, the madhouse community mirrored the family hierarchy so cher-
ished by bourgeois society. The doctor posed as a patriarchal figure while
the patient was seen as a child into whose life the doctor (re)introduced
order and discipline. Mental illness was understood as a childlike state, and
the doctor’s art consisted of a masterful control over the deluded childish
psyche and the manipulation of fear. With most subsequent professionals
trained by his textbook and in his private asylum, Schwartzer’s influence
cannot be underestimated at the birth of Hungarian psychiatry.
Chapter 4 entitled The Kingdom in Miniature. Public Asylums from the
1860s reconstructs the life and everyday practices and treatment in public
asylums and discusses their legal, financial and managerial arrangements.
Opened just a year after the 1867 Compromise between Hungary and
Austria, the establishment of Lipótmező Royal National Lunatic Asylum
in Buda was strongly connected to the recent constitutional triumph of
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

the country and became a symbol of national independence and civilised

statehood. In contrast to the private madhouse as a substitute bourgeois
home and family for the deranged, the large public asylum functioned
as a miniature version of the Hungarian Kingdom with its multiplicity
of ethnic, religious, linguistic, social and cultural groups and traditions.
In the outskirts of a hectic city, the large public asylum embodied tradi-
tional society and (political) order. It was a closed, self-contained and
self-sustaining world. Its administrative machinery worked in the spirit of
a modern state bureaucracy producing statistics, tables and charts in order
to gauge the sociological and pathological parameters of the kingdom.
With the advent of public state asylums in the 1860s, issues of the
legal and financial arrangements of institutional mental health care came
to the fore. Its complex system is recovered from original sources, giving
rise to a picture of chaotic placement and movement of patients among
institutions in the country. The chapter also reconstructs in detail the
evolving legal regulations for patients’ admission, discharge and place-
ment under guardianship. Contrasting these with the actual reality of
these practices, one finds considerable discrepancies between regulation
and implementation. Finally, the chapter captures aspects of the everyday
life at the asylum, the conditions and problems with nursing, different
forms of treatment (medication, work therapy, entertainments), the use
of coercion, restraint and other types of disciplinary measures.
Chapter 5, The University Clinic and the Birth of Biological Psychiatry.
Academic Research, Teaching and Therapy from the 1880s, explores the
rise of neuro-scientific research in Hungarian psychiatry from the 1870s
and the establishment of the University Department in Mental Health
and Pathology and its related clinic (1882). Compared to the micro-
society of the asylum, the university psychiatric clinic was a very different
“small world.” It functioned as an “obligatory passage point” for medical
students, academic researchers, mental and nervous patients as well as
criminals suspected of mental derangement (concerning the latter, most
of these criminals were compulsorily brought in by the police for mental
observation). Rather than provinciality, isolation, and closedness, charac-
teristic of the asylums, the essence of the psychiatric clinic was progress,
centrality, integration, and openness. Instead of representing order and
an attempt to reproduce “normal life,” the small clinic was marked by
chaos, a multiplicity of functions and the consequent fragmentation of
the doctors’ work. Apart from its actual physical space, the psychiatric
clinic also occupied a virtual space: it formed part of a boundless virtual
12 E. LAFFERTON

network of scientists that extended beyond national borders. Beyond the

physical space of the clinic/lab, the virtual space of this invisible college
was the world of international journals and the transnational network of
scholars.
The chapter reconstructs distinct research practices (brain dissec-
tion, histological laboratory work, microscopic observation, experimental
research) that became emblematic of the psychiatric clinic. For instance, I
demonstrate that hypnosis was central to university psychiatry and clinical
studies and that its investigation served clear professional and academic
goals. Hypnosis research reveals professional anxieties over the “scientific”
underpinnings of psychiatry in the period when the profession was still
struggling to gain credibility and status among the medical disciplines.
The controversies around hypnosis bring to light a deep schism within
the psychiatric profession by the end of the century, a schism that can
be explained by the crucial differences between forms of life, theories of
mental illness and practices embodied in the institutions of the asylum
and the psychiatric clinic, respectively. Many of the research practices at
the psychiatric clinic showed an interest in the “dead” rather than the
living patient, and in the case of living patients, the primacy of experi-
mentation over treatment. Such experimentation reflected the sacrifice of
the unity of the mind, soul and body of the person. Thus, in addition
to professional power struggles, asylum doctors’ fierce attacks on labora-
tory research or experimental hypnosis research were also an attempt to
rehabilitate the living patient and the holistic view that had traditionally
characterised asylum psychiatry.
Laboratory investigations in psychiatry, the concentration on brain
anatomy and the patho-physiological and neurological mechanisms of
psychiatric disorders at first gave rise to great hopes but in the end failed
to advance therapeutics. New studies confirmed the organic nature of
some mental diseases (such as the cause of paralysis in neurosyphilis) and
claimed that many underlying pathological processes were irreversible.
This was coupled with the disastrous conditions that were discovered
to prevail in overcrowded asylums and hospital wards by the 1880s,
as a result of which a general therapeutic pessimism pervaded psychi-
atry. This therapeutic “nihilism,” together with lacking resources, urged
psychiatrists to look for alternative therapeutic solutions in other types
of institutions and psychiatric practices. Chapter 6, Fragmenting Insti-
tutional Landscape. Alternatives of Specialised Institutions, Colonies and
Family Care on the Turn of the Century demonstrates a move from
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

“heterogenous” to “homogeneous,” specialised institutions based on the

model of tuberculosis clinics and discusses in detail the lobbying for and
establishment of institutes for epileptics, “imbeciles,” “idiot children,”
criminals, nervous patients, alcoholics, etc. Creating “homogeneous”
little islands of particular mental illnesses in the vast sea of mental and
social pathology seemed at the time a more viable solution for psychi-
atric and social problems than the large institutions that functioned
as a “melting pot” of mental disorders. Family care for the mentally
ill was also strongly advocated alongside such alternative formations as
colonies. These were spacious mental institutions consisting of many small
houses rather than huge closed buildings and forming a mostly self-
sustaining economic unit organised around some agricultural or other
occupation, which also functioned as work therapy. Institutions such
as the Dicsőszentmárton (1905) and the Nagydisznód (1906) colonies
combined the characteristics of the colony with family care.
After these chapters on institutions and their complex worlds of
practices and theories, the following chapters demonstrate how the
progressing disciplinary and institutional fragmentation of psychiatry went
hand in hand with a gradual extension of psychiatric expertise into the
public and private spheres of life by the end of the century. Psychiatry
gradually moved beyond its narrowly defined disciplinary area and increas-
ingly became a public affair. Formally investing mostly in the pathological
realm of life and concerned with mental patients (individuals or insti-
tutional populations), psychiatrists extended their agency in the larger
social domain and focused on more general social problems and their
potential influence on healthy people, crowds and the nation. With these
developments, they were gradually attributed expertise in the “hygiene of
everyday life” as well as some control over the “health” of society. They
touched politics and formed a social critique in ways unprecedented in
psychiatric history.
Chapter 7, Asylum Statistics and the Psycho-Social Reality of the
Hungarian Kingdom explores the grounds on which psychiatrists could
legitimately build and spread their social criticism. It demonstrates how
asylums were scaled-down images of society by reconstructing the patient
populations of three major mental asylums, relying on published statistics
and the author’s original survey of asylum patient files. The latter enabled
a systematic survey on almost 3,000 case histories between 1868 and
1915 and the complex analysis of sociological and pathological param-
eters of the mental patient population in the Kingdom, including those
14 E. LAFFERTON

of gender, age at the time of admission, marital status, religious affil-

iation, social and professional status and mental illness diagnosis. The
asylum population reflected the Kingdom’s social and cultural diversity
and complexity, distorted in revealing ways by social, class and gender
inequalities. Importantly, asylum statistics also suggest a strong correla-
tion between grave social problems, such as alcoholism, prostitution, or
pauperism, and dominant forms of mental pathology.
The findings also allow for a critical reassessment of several claims
prevalent in both late-nineteenth century psychiatric literature and the
historiography of psychiatry. These include, among others, the argument
that madness became a “female malady” in both cultural representation
and institutional reality, the alleged “enormous” influence, widespread
in nineteenth-century psychiatric texts, of female reproductive functions
and biological processes on the mental state, and fin-de-siècle medical
assumptions about Jewish nervousness. The analysis of the sociological
and medical parameters of the inmate population also demonstrates that
asylum files yield little evidence of the biological causes of or propensities
for mental illness. At the same time, these data reveal the socially unequal
“medicalisation” of society in this period, the different extent of access to
and reliance on medical services by various social groups.
Chapter 8, Invading the Public and the Private. The Hygiene of
Everyday Life, Shell-Shock and the Politics of Turn-of-the-Century Psychi-
atric Expertise reconstructs the social criticism psychiatrist formulated in
scientific forums and the public space, building on the strong connec-
tions, demonstrated in the previous chapter, between mental pathology
and social problems. By intervening to solve these, including alcoholism,
pauperism, prostitution, syphilis, effects of industrialisation, gender rela-
tions, political unrest, etc., psychiatrists contributed to the crystallisation
of the hygiene of a healthy mental and physical “everyday” life, in which
prophylactics figured centrally. The chapter situates their work within
the wider context of “degenerationist” thinking, eugenics, and turn-
of-the-century culture. It discusses how manifestations of a perceived
degeneration within “civilization”—capitalism, socialism, feminism, anar-
chism, the Decadent movement, crime, declining birth rates, high suicide
rates and insanity—became signifiers of cultural crisis that contemporary
scientists translated into a language of social pathology.
The last section of the chapter reflects on shell-shock in Hungary,
another area where psychiatrists’ political role was visible. It presents
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

divergent theories on war neurosis and therapies and how this involve-
ment with war neurosis helped psychiatry to further its social function
through healing but also providing expert knowledge in areas of national
concern: curing troubled soldiers and returning them to the battlefield as
well as deciding who was a malingerer, a pension-seeker, etc. Shell-shock
also allows us to discuss Sándor Ferenczi’s contribution to the matter
and emphasise the short-lived, triumphant period of psychoanalysis with
a centre in Budapest in 1918–1919.
The final, concluding chapter summarises the complex developments in
Hungarian psychiatry from the private asylum to a heterogeneous insti-
tutional landscape and from healing the mind of the insane to healing
the ills of society. It recapitulates how—after the appearance of the first
lunatic asylums and the clarification of the first concerns (treating mental
patients isolated in asylums with professional care)—psychiatry went
through growth and fragmentation that brought about multiple institu-
tional forms, alternative therapeutic choices and psychiatric practices, and
manifold professional roles in society. This multiplication and fragmen-
tation, the crystallisation of distinct approaches and interests within the
expanding professional community, went hand in hand with a growing
sense of cohesion of the psychiatric profession at large. It resulted in the
extension of psychiatric expertise to social areas and the appropriation
of cultural monopoly over a number of issues related to the hygiene of
everyday life as well as a “healthy” society.

Notes
1. See Ernest Gellner, Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein, Mali-
nowski, and the Habsburg Dilemma (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998).
2. From the Compromise in 1867 till its dissolution in 1918, the
Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (or Dual Monarchy) comprised both
Austria and the Hungarian Kingdom as two parts of the dualist
state. It is also often referred to as the Habsburg Monarchy or the
Habsburg Empire.
3. Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture
(Vintage Books, 1979).
4. Péter Hanák, The Garden and the Workshop (Princeton University
Press, 1998).
16 E. LAFFERTON

5. I widely refer to western historiography in the relevant chap-

ters throughout the book and give a more systematic review of
the scholarship in Chapter 2 which outlines Western psychiatric
developments.
6. See illustrated in detail at the beginning of Chapter 2.
7. For a review of the origins and characteristics of the fields of
medical history and science in East-Central Europe, see Tatjana
Buklijas and Emese Lafferton, eds., “Science, Medicine and
Nationalism in the Habsburg Empire from the 1840s to 1918,”
Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical
Sciences 38 (2007): 679–774.
8. Magyar Orvostörténelmi Társaság, founded in 1905, re-founded
in 1966, http://mot.orvostortenelem.hu/.
9. http://semmelweismuseum.hu/.
10. Pál Harmat, Freud, Ferenczi és a magyarországi pszichoanalízis. A
budapesti mélylélektani iskola története, 1908–1983 (Bern: Európai
Protestáns Magyar Szabadegyetem, 1986), with a second, revised
and enlarged edition that came out at Sopron: Bethlen Gábor
Könyvkiadó, 1994.
11. See Ferenc Erős, ed., Ferenczi Sándor (Budapest: Új Mandátum,
2000); Ferenc Erős, Kultuszok a pszichoanalízis történetében (Cults
in the History of Psychoanalysis) (Budapest: Jószöveg Műhely,
2004); Trauma és történelem: Szociálpszichológiai és pszichoanal-
itikus tanulmányok (Trauma and History: Studies in Social
Psychology and Psychoanalysis) (Budapest: Jószöveg Műhely, 2007);
Pszichoanalízis és kulturális emlékezet (Psychoanalysis and Cultural
Memory) (Jószöveg Műhely, Bp., 2010); Psziché és hatalom. Tanul-
mányok, esszék (Psyche and Power. Studies, Essays) (Budapest: Pesti
Kalligram, 2016).
12. See Csaba Pléh, A lélektan története. 2., bővített kiadás (The
History of Psychology, 2nd, extended edition) (Budapest: Osiris
Kiadó, 2010); History and Theories of Mind (Budapest: Akadémiai
Kiadó, 2008); A pszichológia örök témái. Történeti bevezetés a pszi-
chológiába (Major Themes in Psychology. Historical Introduction to
Psychology) (Budapest: Typotex, 2008).
13. Judit Mészáros, “Az Önök bizottsága” —Ferenczi Sándor, a
budapesti iskola és a pszichoanalitikus emigráció (Budapest:
Akadémiai Kiadó, 2008) and Judit Mészáros, ed., In memoriam
Ferenczi Sándor (Budapest: Jószöveg Műhely, 2000).
 1 INTRODUCTION 17

14. See her work on the connection of psychoanalysis and spiri-

tualism in Hungary in her short monograph: A szellemektől a
tudattalanig —Tudomány, áltudomány, pszichoanalízis (Budapest:
L’Harmattan, 2019).
15. Melinda Kovai, Lélektan és politika—Pszichotudományok a
magyarországi államszocializmusban 1945–1970 (Psychology
and Politics. Psy-Sciences During Hungarian State Socialism
1945–1970) (Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2016).
16. The territories of Buda, Pest and Ancient Buda were only united
in 1873 to form a single city: Budapest.
 CHAPTER 2

Histories of Psychiatry and the Hungarian

Model

The Self-Image
of Late-Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry

Born at the end of the last century, psychiatry slowly gained strength and
cast the different philosophical and ethicoreligious doctrines out; organised
itself on the firm foundations of the natural sciences, and showed a new
direction in therapeutics which began in the 1830s with the elimination
of the coercive tools and resulted in a number of new, monumental insti-
tutions furnished comfortably and with all the scientific equipments which
brought about the unforeseen development of psychiatry.1

In the minds of nineteenth-century psychiatrists, the story of their

discipline was intertwined with ideas of civilisational progress and national
pride. This history consisted of acts of “separations” or “detachments”
and subsequent building. Psychiatry first had to gain distance from the
church, philosophy, and, in a way, medicine (other medical sciences) as
well to free itself from undesirable constraints. The purpose of these
detachments or separations was to define the field and heritage of
psychiatry and to delineate it as markedly distinct from what we could
call the prehistory of dealing with madness. The argumentation of the
above quotation manifests a belief in an unbroken path of development,
a familiar element in late-nineteenth-century psychiatrists’ accounts; it

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 19

Switzerland AG 2022
E. Lafferton, Hungarian Psychiatry, Society and Politics in the Long
Nineteenth Century, Mental Health in Historical Perspective,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85706-6_2
20 E. LAFFERTON

builds on the evolutionary logic that values modern scientific thinking

over the superstitious past.
The story was about “a society standing on a low level of civilisation
and living in blind faith and ignorance” that read the mental patient’s
“striking behaviour and confused talk, hallucinations and illusions, not as
signs of disease,” but as proof that the person “incurred God’s damnation
and now the devil reigns over him.” Pointing to the enormous influ-
ence of the church on the unenlightened mind, the asylum psychiatrist
László Epstein, for instance, repeats the beliefs shared by many of his
colleagues that “numerous melancholics, hysterical, epileptic and other
mental patients ended their lives burning at the stake.”2
Interpretations and inquiries into strange human behaviour as well as
into the realm of the mind had to be expropriated not only from the
church but also from philosophy. The new psychiatric discipline had to be
based on natural scientific foundations and cultivated not by philosophers
but trained doctors. “Even at the end of the eighteenth century, the great
Ideler3 thought that mental afflictions were merely wild and unmanage-
able passions, and, influenced by the philosophy of Kant and Schelling, it
was still highly debated whether the philosopher or the doctor was quali-
fied to make judgements concerning pathological psychic states,” argued
Ernő Moravcsik, eminent clinical psychiatrist in 1906.4
The relationship with medicine was seen as more problematic. Here
not so much a detachment, rather a differentiation or distinction was
needed, the establishment of distinct disciplinary boundaries between
the different medical sciences. Here psychiatry had to consider that, in
certain respects, it did not live up to some core criteria of medicine while
it still had to prove its medical scientific status. Psychiatry was handi-
capped as a science. For a long time, it was considered too “subjective,”
its symptomatology could hardly be based on anatomy, its core concepts
were borrowed from philosophy (…), and objective means of measure-
ment were out of the question. But, as widely held in these optimistic
reports, institutionalisation finally established the “scientific foundation
and further development of psychiatry” within well-equipped university
clinics and thus psychiatry “gained citizenship rights among the medical
sciences.”5
Apart from serving broader civilisational goals, the establishment of
psychiatry in the Hungarian Kingdom was also a fundamentally nationalist
project, a part of the building of the nation state. The emerging psychi-
atry’s self-image did not only incorporate ideas of scientific progress and
 2 HISTORIES OF PSYCHIATRY AND THE HUNGARIAN MODEL 21

social development, it also became the embodiment of national history

and a “national cause.” Psychiatry’s past, present and future were seen as
intimately intertwined with the country’s painful struggles in her past, her
present condition and future prospects of becoming a civilised European
nation.
The idea of psychiatry as a pledge for cultural excellence and civilised
nationhood is elaborated for instance in Ernő Moravcsik’s reasoning.
According to his narrative, in the first part of the nineteenth century,
Hungarian psychiatry was in its “infancy,” there was no independent
research in the field. Some form of mental health care had to be estab-
lished, which was impeded by several factors: political crises, priorities of
the programme of national awakening, the need for the rearrangement of
the state and its constitutional set up—all of which constituted enormous
financial burden for the country. “There were many tasks into numerous
directions that had to be achieved in order to elevate our country to the
level of civilised nations in a short period of time.”6
Opened soon after the 1867 Austro-Hungarian Compromise,
Lipótmező National Asylum7 became attached in the minds of many
with the history and fate of the country. Perhaps paradoxically, it came
to embody independent nationhood. Although planned and built during
the neo-absolutist period, it was nevertheless interpreted as a great
achievement of the constitutional era.8
In the memories of Gusztáv Oláh, a late-nineteenth-century asylum
doctor, contemporary Pest and Buda were proud that the “first great
achievement of independent statehood” was an “unproductive institution
standing for civilisation.”9 Oláh wondered if it was national vanity that
explained such a luxurious building and he likened it to the architecture
of the London asylum Bethlem, which in the seventeenth century was
rebuilt in the semblance of a royal palace: a national fortress modelled on
the Tuileries in Paris and embodying national rivalry. “Lipótmező was also
built with the extravagance and … wastefulness of a princely castle,” Oláh
ironically added.10 The author of a 1867 article on Lipótmező in Hazánk
s a Külföld (Our Nation and Foreign Countries) also describes it as a
“national edifice … of enormous extension,” “one of the most grandiose
buildings of our nation,” which towers above the beautiful park “with
striking beauty, as a stupendous palace.” Its facade is “decorated with a
colossal national coat of arms and crown artistically carved from a huge
stone.”11 The coat of arms on the façade in fact was originally planned
with the Habsburg two-headed eagle but was in the end switched for the
22 E. LAFFERTON

Hungarian crown (as if “it were the seat of the country’s highest polit-
ical authority”12 ). The national lunatic asylum itself became a national
symbol.
The only thing that many could consider a flaw, according to Oláh,
was the German name of the institution’s first director, Emil Schnirch,
who was “nonetheless of Hungarian origin and feeling.” Oláh’s anecdotal
story of Schnirch’s first visit to Béla Wenckheim, the Minister of Inte-
rior, is telling about the national sentiment and meaning attached to the
asylum. When Schnirch introduced himself, Wenckheim allegedly replied
that such a German-sounding name was not so fortunate at the head of
the country’s greatest institution and advised Schnirch to “magyarize” it.
Schnirch’s bold and self-conscious response was that “In this question, I
will regard your Excellency as an example to be followed!”,13 which Oláh
explained with Schnirch’s intoxication with his new prestigious position.
Mental health care became the “measure of a country’s state of civil-
isation”: “the more developed a country’s culture was,” “the more
numerous are the arrangements with which state and society together
attempt to take care of its mental patients.” In this respect, as Epstein
proudly concludes, “our nation has not only displayed a sense for culture,
but also gave proof of its ability to develop culture from its own
resources.”14
This enthusiastic and rather optimistic picture of the emergence of
Hungarian psychiatry, of course, tells more about how psychiatrists saw
themselves than about anything else. Their claims are, however, perti-
nent to the story of the emergence of psychiatry, as they reflect a proud
nationalist concern connecting the development of psychiatry with the
formation and modernisation of the nation state. At the same time, they
also testify to the historical process during which early practitioners had
to compete with myriads of traditions and self-appointed specialists in
interpreting and treating madness. Bodies of knowledge, roles and prac-
tices had to be appropriated by an emerging group of professionals from
philosophers who speculated about the relationship of the mind, the
soul and the body, from the general medical community that produced
rival frameworks for explaining madness, from clergymen who tradition-
ally administered to matters of the soul, and from individuals of various
standing, eager to alleviate the sufferings of the insane with alternative
practices (“quacks,” wise women, holy men, herbalists, etc.). All of these
were crucial in the formation of a profession that could eventually claim
 2 HISTORIES OF PSYCHIATRY AND THE HUNGARIAN MODEL 23

expertise and exclusive right to interpreting and tending to the mind and
the psyche.
In order to reach a more realistic and historically reliable narrative
about the emergence of Hungarian psychiatry than the one offered in
the self-image of psychiatrists in the period, this chapter draws the map
of various historical contexts for the process. First, I briefly outline some
main trends in the prehistory and early phase of psychiatry in different
European countries based on the scholarship produced in the field of
psychiatric history during the last decades. Then an outline of Hungarian
psychiatric history is presented with reference to the main institutions,
psychiatrists and practices that will be more amply discussed in the rest
of the book. In the present chapter, I lay more emphasis on a number of
closely related issues that are not dwelt upon later in the book but might
be useful as a background for the reader uninitiated in Hungarian medical
history (such as the organisation of public health care, the availability of
healing institutions, the development of medical teaching, to name a few).

Histories of European Psychiatry

The World Without Psychiatry
According to general histories of madness in Europe,15 insanity was
primarily a family responsibility and burden from the ancient Greeks
through the late eighteenth century. Christian Europe made first of all the
family and the close community of the parish responsible in the matter,
though institutionalised isolation of the insane began in the late Middle
Ages. This was mostly upon religious initiatives motivated by piety, like
the madhouse of St Mary of Bethlehem in London from the late four-
teenth century, the healing centre in the Flemish village of Geel , and
early asylums in fifteenth-century Spain.16 These, however, did not result
in the large-scale management of the mad. In his influential book, A
History of Psychiatry, Edward Shorter depicts a rather gloomy picture of
a “world without psychiatry” revealing a general hostility, lack of under-
standing, and the widespread use of physical brutality against the insane
in pre-modern Western societies. “In a world without psychiatry, rather
than being tolerated or indulged, the mentally ill were treated with a
savage lack of feeling. Before the advent of the therapeutic asylum, there
was no golden era, no idyllic refuge for those supposedly deviant from
the values of capitalism. To maintain otherwise is a fantasy.”17 While
24 E. LAFFERTON

numerous sources indeed reflect animosity, lack of understanding and

physical brutality towards the mad in pre-modern times, Shorter’s view of
early family care can partly be seen as the result of his somewhat distorted
view of the history of psychiatry18 and partly as a criticism of Michel
Foucault’s interpretation of the period preceding the time of the “great
confinement.”
In his highly influential early study, Madness and Civilisation (orig-
inally published under the title Histoire de la folie in 1961), Michel
Foucault proposes a powerful theory in discussing the historical roots of
psychiatry. In his chapter, “The great confinement,” Foucault studies the
mushrooming of “enormous houses of confinement” throughout Europe
from the seventeenth century: the wards of the Hôpital Général in Paris,
cells of prisons, bridewells and workhouses where the poor, the pris-
oners, the vagabonds, the insane and the unemployed were incarcerated.
Foucault is interested in the “judicial conscience that could inspire” the
practice of confinement as well as the “meaning of this proximity” which
provided the rationale for the aggregation of precisely these groups of
people in distinct institutions that were not assigned medical functions.19
In Foucault’s interpretation, confinement was both a moral imperative
and an economic tactic,20 as its original function (to aggregate people)
was complemented with a new function: to make those confined work
and thus contribute to social prosperity. Confinement was a matter of
policing that understood work as a necessity: its rationale was organised
around bourgeois values of the “imperative of labour,” a “condemna-
tion of idleness.” The historically new element in confinement from the
mid-seventeenth century was that the deviant and workless person was no
longer simply punished or exiled, but, according to an “implicit system
of obligation,” the madman was taken into custody at public expense and
deprived of his individual liberty (48). The new institutions of confine-
ment did not simply operate as a refuge, not even merely as a “forced
labour camp,” but they had an “ethical status” as a “moral institution
responsible for punishing, for correcting a certain moral ‘abeyance’ which
does not merit the tribunal of men, but cannot be corrected by the
severity of penance alone.” In the new era, the madman no longer lived in
the world of the irrational. He “crosses the frontiers of bourgeois order
of his own accord and alienates himself outside the sacred limits of its
ethic.” The “old rites of excommunication were revived, but in the world
of production and commerce,” and its ethical basis was derived “from the
law of work” (57–60).
 2 HISTORIES OF PSYCHIATRY AND THE HUNGARIAN MODEL 25

Foucault’s interpretation built on a complicity theory involving the

Monarchy and the bourgeoisie and saw confinement as integral part of
the secular (monarchical and bourgeois) order in France. While he states
that the church was left out of the organisation of the Hôpital Général,
the house of confinement in the classical age “constitutes the densest
symbol of that ‘police’ which conceived of itself as the civil equivalent
of religion for the edification of a perfect city” (63). The institutions of
absolute monarchy that became symbolic of its arbitrary power thus bear
the inscription of “the great bourgeois, and soon republican, idea that
virtue, too, is an affair of state, that decrees can be published to make it
flourish, that an authority can be established to make sure it is respected”
(60–61).
Foucault’s Madness and Civilization represents a powerful trend of
anti-psychiatry from the early 1960s. This trend was also marked by works
such as Thomas Szász’s The Myth of Mental Illness, Erving Goffman’s
Asylums and R.D. Laing’s The Divided Self .21 The Hungarian-born
Thomas Szász was undoubtedly the most influential spokesman for the
interpretation of psychiatry as a professional plot, a conspiratorial scheme
by its practitioners in the “manufacture of madness.” With his elaboration
of the notion of mental illness as a “myth,”22 Szász went as far as denying
the autonomous existence of insanity as a disease.23
While this scholarship electrified the field and provoked a wealth of
literature with its critical intent of uncovering the sinister aspects of
and conspiratorial forces behind psychiatric institutionalisation, its ideo-
logical and political content is indubitable. Intellectually, this literature
was a critical response to the Whiggish historiography of psychiatry in
the 1930s–1950s, marked by internalist and progressivist accounts with
special emphasis on the “great representatives” of psychiatry and a cumu-
lative, optimistic intellectual history largely neglecting the wider social
context of its working. Politically and ideologically, it was a fierce attack
on the institutional structures of power in modern society and a radical
movement against contemporary psychiatric institutions, embedded in
the counter-cultural movement of the 1960s.24 While anti-psychiatry was
a revisionism of Whiggish psychiatric history of the former decades, it
also provoked a new revisionism of its own ideological and intellectual
tenets.25
Although many studies followed in the Foucauldian and anti-
psychiatric line in the 1970s (some of these produced by sociologists
and social historians),26 Foucault’s explanation of European psychiatry’s
26 E. LAFFERTON

historical roots (or prehistory) in the state-led sequestration of lunatics

together with vagabonds, petty criminals, prostitutes, etc., taken as a form
of policing by the absolutist state and widely applicable to Europe has
been contested by many scholars.27 Thanks to the growing field of psychi-
atric history from the 1980s, numerous scholars have studied the distinct
national psychiatric histories of different European nations and scrutinised
new aspects of the field.28
Roy Porter provided a convincing criticism of Foucault’s ambitious
thesis in his Mind-Forg’d Manacles, by now regarded as a classic history of
madness in England in the period from the Restoration to the Regency.29
Porter only partially accepted the model provided by Foucault. While he
believed that a pessimistic interpretation of the emergent policy targeting
the socially dangerous and difficult as an essentially repressive scheme
sounded more realistic than Whiggish historical accounts of the Age of
Reason freeing the mad, Porter listed several observations that under-
mined Foucault’s theory. He saw a problem with the assumed magnitude
of confinement which “was hardly ‘great’”30 and claimed that there was
neither central nor local co-ordination for sequestering the poor insane in
England during the eighteenth century.31 At the end of the eighteenth
century, England had eight asylums or public charities (the most famous
of which was the London city-run Bethlem which catered to only 122
patients in 1815), whereas a greater number of the insane were taken care
of in private asylums.32 The number of licensed private asylums totalled
around 50 in 1800.33 According to Shorter, by 1826, “not quite five
thousand insane people were confined in any form, 64% of them in the
private sector, 36% in the public … in a country of 10 million people.”34
Porter also disagreed with the interpretation that, due to the underlying
bourgeois work ethos, lunatics were “set to work as a moral duty.” Asylum
life itself was characterised by idleness, and when introduced, work was
employed as therapy rather than punishment.35
As Porter claims, in the rest of Europe, state-organised institutional-
isation emerged considerably later (the great confinement was brought
about in the nineteenth century); whereas in urban Europe, and especially
in England, the rise of the asylum was mostly an offshoot of commer-
cial society, initially devoid of medical attendance.36 The intensive “trade
in lunacy” (as Parry-Jones called it), the profit-oriented and unregulated
free market in the control of madness emerging in eighteenth-century
England was characterised by numerous private asylums often led by lay
 2 HISTORIES OF PSYCHIATRY AND THE HUNGARIAN MODEL 27

superintendents and without any medical supervision.37 These institu-

tions inspired by the entrepreneurial spirit carried primarily custodial and
not therapeutic functions. The use of physical coercion was widespread
with some form of order attained by the brutal use of chains and whips.
These practices and attitude later qualified as inhumane and unacceptably
cruel, however, were pervasive givens in European societies at the time.38
Foucault’s theory is by now generally accepted to be pertinent
only to the French situation, though in Shorter’s mind, not even to
that.39 According to him, in more centralised France, late-eighteenth-
century public custodial institutions (including the hospices described
by Foucault), with the paradigmatic examples of Bicêtre and Salpêtrière
hospitals, were places of internment for all kinds of poor, old and deviant
people. However, these institutions were not therapeutic institutions and
the number of psychiatric patients hosted within their walls was not
considerable.40 Shorter stresses that little data is known yet concerning
the “the exact mix of inmates” in workhouses and hospices, “but the
number of beggars, elderly people, and organically ill in these institutions
seems to have been so high as to give them a decidedly nonpsychiatric
stamp.”41
In the smaller states of Central Europe, lacking the centralised govern-
ment of France, the responsibility for psychiatric care was divided between
state, church and local community. Some of the German Tollhäuser
(fools’ houses) date back to the Middle Ages, while the eighteenth
century produced new asylums, almshouses and jails. However, there is
no evidence of any great confinement, Shorter states. In statist Germany,
“psychiatry was a dead letter before the nineteenth century.”42 Austria,
under more centralised rule, did not produce numerous lunatic asylums
until quite late. In Vienna, the first madhouse, Narrenturm (“fools’
tower”), was established by Joseph II in 1784 (together with the 2,000-
bed Allgemeine Krankenhaus ) as a sign of the enlightened absolutist drive
for centralisation. The round-shaped building contained 139 barred cells
on five floors with corridors running inside and opening to the court.
With its heavy bars and chains, the Narrenturm was a place of gothic
horror, true to the concept of health police by aiming at protecting the
insane from themselves and society from the insane.43 In Prague, a Toll-
haus was built attached to the public hospital in 1790.44 Plans for new
buildings to provide more adequate care for the insane in the Austrian
capital were postponed from time to time. The famous Döbling madhouse
28 E. LAFFERTON

built in the outskirts of Vienna in 1819 was, according to Erna Lesky, the
first private hospital specialising in the insane in Austria.45
We can conclude that early custodial institutionalisation neither
reached great magnitude, nor was characterised by therapeutic intent.
These institutions neither helped to mark the dividing line between the
mentally ill and other poor inmates, nor used practices that would later
be introduced in psychiatric institutions.

Therapeutic Asylums and Moral Treatment

A significant change in the care of the mad occurred when new ideas
emerged stressing the advantage of the isolation of the insane in asylums
where management of the patients became more important than tradi-
tional medical administration to the body. The belief that the isolated
world of the asylum was beneficial for the patient was espoused with
the Enlightenment notion of curability and a new therapeutic optimism
pervading the medical world in the second part of the eighteenth century.
The cruelty, neglect and physical coercion that characterised early custo-
dial institutions and asylums were largely exchanged for more humane and
often even affectionate treatment. Former forms of mechanical restraint
(the chains, cuffs and whips) were discarded and the only “legitimate”
tool to control patients that remained was the straitjacket.
By the nineteenth century, the “new” or “therapeutic” asylum was
heralded as a progressive institution, in fact the only institution that could
provide effective treatment for the mad. While this movement was inter-
national and general scholarship names the Italian Vincenzio Chiarugi
(1759–1820), the French Philippe Pinel (1745–1826) and members of
the English Tuke dynasty as the main heroes of this reform movement,
Shorter pinpoints the emergence of the idea of the therapeutic asylum in
the work of the English William Battie, founding medical officer of St.
Luke’s Hospital in London.46
Chiarugi, physician in an overcrowded hospice in Florence, lobbied
for the renovation of the old Bonifazio hospital which opened in 1788
as a new mental hospital. Chiarugi had a clear idea of how to regulate
and run it with the intent of curing the patients isolated within its walls.
He attempted to minimise restraint and substitute cruelty with kindness
and humane treatment.47 The hero of the therapeutic asylum, however,
was undoubtedly Pinel whose significance in the history of psychiatry
was further enhanced with stories about his freeing the insane from
 2 HISTORIES OF PSYCHIATRY AND THE HUNGARIAN MODEL 29

their chains at Bicêtre in 1794.48 In 1795, Pinel became the director

of Salpêtrière. Based on his experience at these institutions, his work
Traité médico-philosophique sur l’aliénation mentale (Paris, 1801) became
the manifesto of reformed therapeutics for the insane in the upcoming
decades. For Pinel, insanity was primarily a mental condition. He stressed
the psychological factors in the aetiology of insanity and emphasised
psychological treatment, the almost exclusive use of le traitement moral
and the abandonment of medical treatment49 (although he used the latter
in cases where moral therapy failed).50
Moral therapy consisted of gentleness and the exploitation of the
doctor’s face-to-face authority and charismatic powers. In line with
Enlightenment thinking, the insane patient was no longer seen as an
animal, but as a human being whose deluded ideas could be corrected
with the power of rationality and the introduction of order.51 Ordered
life, work and systematic activity thus became the essential tools of
therapy, complemented with the use of warm baths to calm patients.
Pinel’s pupil, Jean-Etienne-Dominique Esquirol (1772–1840), put into
practice Pinel’s idea of the therapeutic community and was the most
important follower of moral therapy in Paris in the following decades.52
The origin of moral treatment in England53 (which developed inde-
pendently) is traditionally traced back to the work of William Tuke in
his York Retreat, a private asylum he founded in 1796.54 A Quaker
tea-merchant, Tuke, set up his private retreat to provide therapeutic
care for the Quaker community after a scandalous incident at the old
York Asylum which outraged the community and was detrimental to
the asylum’s reputation. The Retreat was run by the merchant dynasty
for several generations. At the York Retreat, patients and staff formed a
closed community, they lived, worked and ate together. The management
of asylum life became regarded as therapeutic, bolstered by a system of
praise and punishment which aimed at the re-education of the person
through the restoration of self-control.55 An increasing emphasis was laid
on the internalisation of self-discipline and bourgeois values of work, time
and order which followed the line of the long-term process of civilisation
described by Norbert Elias in his influential work The Civilising Process.
Due to the efficacy of the York Retreat in treating the mad, moral therapy
spread in England and was practised in numerous asylums in the first part
of the nineteenth century.
Another random document with
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the camp, however, the messenger saw the barbarians
pointing rifles at him, so that he turned and fled.
“On the afternoon of the 24th, vast columns of smoke were
seen rising to the north-west, and it was ascertained that the
barbarians had entered the Summer Palace, and after
plundering the three main halls, leaving them absolutely bare,
they had set fire to the buildings. Their excuse for this
abominable behaviour is that their troops got out of hand, and
had committed the incendiarism. After this they issued
notices, placarded everywhere, in very bad Chinese, stating
that unless terms of peace had been arranged before mid-day
on the 29th, they would then bombard Peking, in which case
all inhabitants who did not wish to share the fate of the city
had better remove themselves to a safe distance.
“On this day it was reported that The Sacred Chariot had
reached Jehol in safety, but His Majesty had been greatly
alarmed, and had issued a Decree expressing regret for his
failure to commit suicide on the approach of the invaders. The
Emperor is reported to be ill, and it is said that the Princes
Tsai Yüan and Tuan Hua are trying to get themselves
appointed to the Grand Council. Should the Emperor die (lit.
‘when ten thousand years have passed’) the Yi concubine will
be made Empress Dowager, but at present she is reported to
be at variance with the Princes, who are endeavouring to
prejudice the Emperor against her.
“I learnt that all was quiet at the temple where my mother’s
coffin rests. Troops were passing there daily, but, so far, none
had occupied it. On the 29th, my servant-boy, Yung ’Erh,
came to tell me that troops from Tientsin in the pay of the
barbarians had occupied the temple, but on proceeding
thither I found them to be General Sheng’s men. Prince
Seng’s troops were also near at hand, so that, if a
bombardment had taken place, what could have prevented
the destruction of the temple, and what would then have
become of my mother’s remains? I therefore decided to
engage wheelbarrows and handcarts, at six taels apiece, to
take my family to Pao-ting fu, and I arranged with the
undertakers to hire bearers for the coffin.
“At 11 a.m. of the same day the barbarians entered the city
by the Anting gate, occupying its tower and the wall adjoining.
One large cannon and four small ones were placed in position
on the wall, and a five-coloured flag hoisted there. With the
exception of the officials entrusted with the duty of
negotiating, not one remained in the city. Two days ago the
prisoner Parkes, and his companions, were sent back to the
enemy with every mark of courtesy. Scarcely had they
reached their camp when a special Decree, post-haste from
Jehol, ordered Prince Kung to decapitate them all forthwith as
a warning to the bandits who had dared to invade the sacred
precincts of the Palace. As the Yi concubine had urged their
execution from the very first, it would seem as if her influence
were again in the ascendant.
“On the 1st of the 9th Moon, the ‘Chang-yi’ gate was
closed, but I managed to leave the city by the Hsi-pien Men,
where I was nearly crushed to death in the enormous crowd.
Upon my arrival at the temple, I had a nice wadded cover
made to put over the coffin, and then hurried back to the city
to arrange for the cortège leaving next morning. The
President of the Board of Finance, Liang Hai-lou, was hiding
in the temple precincts with his family and chief concubine, all
wearing common clothes and unshaven. This is a good
example of the condition to which the very highest had been
reduced.
“Next morning, on reaching the temple, I found the coffin-
bearers and transport coolies on the spot. But, unfortunately,
in my hurry, I failed to notice that the undertakers had
supplied the frame, on which the coffin is carried, of a size
smaller than had been agreed upon, so that instead of sixteen
bearers there were but eight. We started, however, and the
procession’s appearance of panic-stricken fugitives was most
distressing to contemplate. But what could I do? The first and
only object in my mind was to protect my mother’s coffin. I
have omitted to state that my small servant-boy, Yung ’Erh,
had started to accompany the coffin on foot. But, after they
had started, it occurred to me that the lad could never stand
so long a journey, and that should my mother be aware of it,
she would be extremely anxious about him. Therefore, I
quickly engaged another wheelbarrow for Yung ’Erh, and
bade the coolies hurry after the procession.
“On returning home I felt uneasy about the jolting which my
mother’s coffin must have experienced on the undersized
frame. I went, therefore, to the undertakers and expostulated
with them for having cheated me. After much altercation they
agreed to change the frame, but I was to pay two taels more
for the larger size. I subsequently learned that they failed to
keep their promise, but there was no good to be got by suing
them for breach of faith. They are sordid tricksters. Yung ’Erh
wrote, however, to assure me that the party had reached Pao-
ting fu in safety, and that the coffin had not been jolted in the
least. On removing the wrappings the lacquer was found to be
undamaged.
“The barbarians were now in full possession of the city, and
rumours were rife on all sides. Everyone in Peking—there
were still a good many people—was terrified, and the
Manchus were sending their families from the Tartar to the
southern (Chinese) city to save their women from being
outraged by the barbarian bandits. The condition of the
people was indeed deplorable in the extreme. One of the
Censors had sent a Memorial to Jehol, reproaching the
Emperor for the pass to which he had brought his people, and
for the neglect of ancestral worship caused by his absence.
He blamed His Majesty for listening to evil advisers, and
besought him to return to his capital.
“The minds of the people were becoming more than ever
disturbed, because it was now reported that the negotiations
for peace had so far failed, either because Prince Kung would
not entertain the barbarians’ conditions, or because the latter
were too utterly preposterous.
 “On the 6th, a despatch arrived from the British barbarians,
accusing China of having violated all civilised usage in
torturing to death their fellow-countrymen. For this they
demanded an indemnity of 500,000 taels. At the same time
came a despatch from the Russian barbarians, saying that
they had heard that England was demanding this indemnity,
but they (the Russians) were prepared to use their influence
and good offices to persuade the British to abate their claims.
Prince Kung was of opinion that, even if they should be
successful in this proposed mediation, China would only save
some 100,000 taels, and for this she would place herself
under heavy obligations to Russia. So he replied, declining
the offer on the ground that the British claim had already been
accepted by China, and that further discussion of the matter
was therefore impossible. Thereupon the Russians wrote
again, saying that if China had definitely accepted the British
terms there was, of course, nothing more to be said, but they
asked Prince Kung to note that they had induced England to
forgo half of the indemnity of two million taels originally asked,
as a set-off to China for the destruction of the Summer
Palace. On the 9th, Prince Kung forwarded the 500,000 taels
to the British barbarians.
“The whole sixteen articles of the barbarians’ demands
have finally been accepted without modification. The only
thing that our negotiators asked was the immediate
withdrawal of the invading army, and to obtain this they were
prepared to yield everything. Therefore, the barbarians openly
flout China for her lack of men. Woe is me; a pitiful tale, and
one hard to tell! When the Yi concubine heard of Prince
Kung’s complete surrender to the barbarians she reproached
the Emperor for allowing his brother to negotiate, and she
implored him to re-open hostilities. But His Majesty was
dangerously ill, and refused to leave Jehol, so that our
revenge must be postponed for the time being.”
 H.I.H. P’u Ju, Cousin of the Present Emperor, Son of the Boxer Prince
Tsai-Ying, and Grandson of Prince Kung.

Bearing in mind the frequent allusions made by the Hanlin diarist

to the Emperor’s indecision of purpose at the time of the advance of
the British and French armies on Peking, it is reasonable to assume
that Yehonala prompted, if she did not write, the following vigorous
Edict, which appeared on the 3rd day of the 8th Moon in the 10th
year of Hsien-Feng (6th September 1860):—

“Swaying the wide world, we are nevertheless animated by

one and the same instinct of benevolence to all. We have
never forbidden England and France to trade with China, and
for long years there has been peace between them and us.
But three years ago the English, for no good cause, invaded
our city of Canton, and carried off our officials into captivity.
We refrained at that time from taking any retaliatory
measures, because we were compelled to recognise that the
obstinacy of the Viceroy Yeh had been in some measure a
cause of the hostilities. Two years ago the barbarian
Commander Elgin came north, and we then commanded the
Viceroy of Chihli, T’an Ting-hsiang, to look into matters
preparatory to negotiations. But the barbarian took advantage
of our unreadiness, attacking the Taku forts and pressing on
to Tientsin. Being anxious to spare our people the horrors of
war, we again refrained from retaliation and ordered Kuei
Liang to discuss terms of peace. Notwithstanding the
outrageous nature of the barbarians’ demands, we
subsequently ordered Kuei Liang to proceed to Shanghai in
connection with the proposed Treaty of Commerce, and even
permitted its ratification as earnest of our good faith.
“In spite of all this the barbarian leader Bruce again
displayed intractability of the most unreasonable kind and
once more appeared off Taku with a squadron of warships in
the 8th Moon. Seng Ko Lin Ch’in thereupon attacked him
fiercely and compelled him to make a hasty retreat. From all
these facts it is clear that China has committed no breach of
faith and that the barbarians have been in the wrong. During
the present year the barbarian leaders Elgin and Gros have
again appeared off our coasts, but China, unwilling to resort
to extreme measures, agreed to their landing and permitted
them to come to Peking for the ratification of the Treaty.
 “Who could have believed that all this time these barbarians
have been darkly plotting and that they had brought with them
an army of soldiers and artillery, with which they attacked the
Taku forts from the rear, and, having driven out our forces,
advanced upon Tientsin! Once more we ordered Kuei Liang to
go to Tientsin and endeavour to reason with them, in the hope
that they might not be lost to all sense of propriety, and with
the full intention that their demands, if not utterly
unreasonable, should be conceded. To our utter
astonishment, Elgin and his colleague had the audacity to
demand an indemnity from China; they asked, too, that more
Treaty ports should be opened, and that they should be
allowed to occupy our capital with their army. To such lengths
did their brutality and cunning lead them! But we then
commanded Prince Yi and Mu Yin, the President of the Board
of War, to endeavour to induce in them a more reasonable
spirit and to come to some satisfactory arrangement. But
these treacherous barbarians dared to advance their savage
soldiery towards Tungchow and to announce their intention of
compelling us to receive them in audience.
“Any further forbearance on our part would be a dereliction
of our duty to the Empire, so that we have now commanded
our armies to attack them with all possible energy and we
have directed the local gentry to organise train-bands, and
with them either to join in the attack or to block the barbarians’
advance. Hereby we make offer of the following rewards:—
For the head of a black barbarian, 50 taels, and for the head
of a white barbarian, 100 taels. For the capture of a barbarian
leader, alive or dead, 500 taels, and for the seizure or
destruction of a barbarian vessel, 5,000 taels. The inhabitants
of Tientsin are reputed brave. Let them now come forward
and rid us of these pestilential savages, either by open attack
or by artifice. We are no lovers of war, but all our people must
admit that this has been forced upon us.
“As to the barbarians’ seizure of portions of our territory in
Kuangtung and Fukhien, all our subjects are alike our children
 and we will issue large rewards to any of them in the south
who shall present us with the head of a barbarian chief.
“These barbarians live in the remote parts of the earth,
whence they come to China for purposes of trade. Their
outrageous proceedings have, we understand, been
encouraged by abominable traitors among our own subjects.
We now command that all the Treaty ports be closed and all
trade with England and France stopped. Subjects of other
submissive States are not to be molested, and whensoever
the British and French repent them of their evil ways and
return to their allegiance, we shall be pleased to permit them
to trade again, as of old, so that our clemency may be made
manifest. But should they persist in their wicked violation of
every right principle, our armies must mightily smite them, and
pledge themselves solemnly to destroy utterly these evil-
doers. May they repent while yet there is time!”

Three days later Yehonala was present at the morning audience,

when the Emperor made the following statement:—

“We learn that the barbarians continue to press upon our

capital. Their demands were all complied with, yet they insist
upon presenting to us in person their barbarous documents of
credentials, and demand that Prince Seng shall withdraw his
troops from Chang-Chia wan. Such insolence as this makes
further parley impossible. Prince Seng has gained one great
victory already, and now his forces are holding the enemy in
check at Palich’iao.”

Orders were issued that the landing of troops from the warships
which had appeared off Kinchou should be stoutly resisted.
On the 7th of the Moon His Majesty sacrificed at the Temple of
Confucius, but on the next morning he was afraid to come into the
city from the Summer Palace, although he wished to sacrifice to the
tutelary deities and inform them of his intended departure. Early on
the following day Prince Kung was appointed Plenipotentiary in the
place of Prince Yi (Tsai Yüan) and the Emperor, despite the brave
wording of his Decree, fled from the capital, after making obeisance
to the God of War in a small temple of the Palace grounds. In the
Decree announcing his departure, the flight was described as an
“autumn tour of inspection.”[3]
The Court started in utter confusion, but proceeded only some
eighteen miles on the road northwards from Peking, stopping for the
first night in a small temple. Here a Decree was issued calling upon
all the Manchurian troops to hasten to Jehol for the protection of the
Court. On the evening of the following day a Memorial was received
from Prince Kung, reporting on the latest doings of the barbarians,
but His Majesty ordered him, in reply, to take whatever steps he
might think fit to deal with the situation. It was out of the question,
said the Rescript, for the Emperor to decide on any course of action
at a distance: in other words, the Throne divested itself of further
responsibility.
On the 11th, the Court lay at the Imperial hunting lodge north of
Mi-Yun hsien. The Chinese chronicler records that the Emperor was
too sick to receive the Grand Council, and delegated his duties to
Yehonala, who thereupon issued the following Decree:—

“We are informed that the pestilent barbarians are pressing

upon our capital, and our Ministers have asked us to summon
reinforcements from the provinces. Now the highest form of
military art is to effect sudden surprises, carefully pre-
arranged. The barbarians’ superiority lies in their firearms, but
if we can only bring them to a hand-to-hand engagement they
will be unable to bring their artillery to bear, and thus shall our
victory be assured. The Mongol and Manchu horsemen are
quite useless for this kind of warfare, but the men of Hupei
and Ssŭ-ch’uan are as agile as monkeys and adepts at the
use of cover in secret approaches. Let them but surprise
these bandits once, and their rout is inevitable. Therefore let
Tseng Kuo-fan, the Viceroy of Hukuang, send up at least
three thousand of his best troops to Peking, and let as many
 be despatched from Ssŭ-ch’uan. Prince Seng’s troops have
been defeated again and again, and the capital is in great
danger. At such a crisis as this, there must be no delay; it is
our earnest hope that a sufficient force will speedily be
collected, so that we may be rid of this poisonous fever-cloud.
For bravery and good service, there will be great rewards. A
most important Decree.”

At the Court’s halting place at Pa-Ko shih, close to the Great Wall,
a Memorial came in from Prince Seng Ko Lin Ch’in, stating that small
scouting parties of the barbarian troops had been seen in the
neighbourhood of Peking, but that as yet there had been no general
bombardment. A Rescript was issued as follows:—

“Inasmuch as it would appear that the pertinacity of these

barbarians will only increase with opposition, it seems
desirable to come to terms with them as soon as possible.
With reference to the French barbarian Gros’s petition to be
permitted to discuss matters with Prince Kung in person, at
Peking, we command the Prince to receive him. But should
the bandits attempt to approach the city in force, Prince Seng
should take them in the rear and cut off their retreat. If by any
chance, however, Peking should be already taken, let the
Mongol regiments be sent up to the Great Wall for the
protection of our person.”

After a leisurely journey, the Court reached Jehol on the 18th. On

the 20th, the opinion of the advisers of the Emperor seemed to be in
favour of continuing the war at all costs. A Decree was issued,
referring to the fact that the foreign troops had dared to encamp near
the Summer Palace, and forbidding Prince Kung to spare the lives of
any captured barbarians upon any pretext whatsoever. To this Prince
Kung replied stating that the prisoners had already been released
and that the Anting gate had been surrendered to the foreigners.
Prince Kung, in fact, was statesman enough to realise that the only
chance for China lay in submission; he therefore ignored the Imperial
Decrees. Before long the Emperor was persuaded to allow
negotiations to be resumed, and on the 15th of the 9th Moon he
confirmed the Treaty, which had been signed in Peking, in the
following Edict:—

“Prince Kung, duly appointed by us to be Plenipotentiary,

concluded, on the 11th and 12th days of this Moon, Treaties
of Peace with the British and the French. Hereafter amity is to
exist between our nations in perpetuity, and the various
conditions of the Treaty are to be strictly observed by all.”
 III
THE TSAI YÜAN CONSPIRACY

It was originally intended that the Emperor Hsien-Feng should

return from Jehol to Peking in the spring of 1861, and a Decree was
issued to that effect. In January, however, his illness had become so
serious that travelling was out of the question, and this Decree was
rescinded.
At Jehol, removed from the direct influence of his brothers, and
enfeebled by sickness, the Emperor had gradually fallen under the
domination of the Prince Yi (Tsai Yüan) with whom were associated,
as Grand Councillors, the Prince Tuan Hua and the Imperial
Clansman Su Shun. These three, recognising that the Emperor’s
end was near and that a Regency would be necessary, determined
on securing the power for themselves. Prince Yi was nominally the
leader of this conspiracy, but its instigator and leading spirit was Su
Shun. Tuan Hua, whose family title was Prince Cheng, was the head
of one of the eight princely Manchu families, descended in the direct
line from Nurhachu’s brother. Su Shun was foster-brother to this
Prince. In his youth he was a conspicuous figure in the capital,
famous for his Mohawk tendencies, a wild blade, addicted to
hawking and riotous living. He had originally been recommended to
the notice of the Emperor by the two Princes and soon won his way
into the dissolute monarch’s confidence and goodwill. From a junior
post in the Board of Revenue, he rose rapidly, becoming eventually
an Assistant Grand Secretary, in which capacity he attained an
unenviable reputation for avarice and cruelty. He had made himself
hated and feared by persuading the Emperor to order the
decapitation of his chief, the Grand Secretary Po Chun,[4] on the
pretext that he had shown favouritism as Chief Examiner for the
Metropolitan Degree,—the real reason being that he had offended
the two Princes by his uncompromising honesty and blunt speech. It
was at this period that he first came into conflict with the young
Yehonala, who, dreading the man’s growing influence with the
Emperor, endeavoured to counteract it, and at the same time to save
the life of the Grand Secretary; she failed in the attempt, and Su
Shun’s position became the stronger for her failure. All those who
opposed him were speedily banished or degraded. The Court was
terrified, especially when it was realised that Yehonala was out of
favour, and Su Shun took care to give them real and frequent cause
for alarm. At his instance, all the Secretaries of the Board of
Revenue were cashiered on a charge of making illicit profits by
cornering the cash market. The charge was possibly well-founded,
since such proceedings are part of a Metropolitan official’s
recognised means of subsistence, but coming from the notoriously
corrupt Su Shun, it was purely vindictive, as was shown by his
subsequent action; for upon this charge he obtained the arrest of
over a hundred notables and rich merchants whom he kept in
custody of no gentle kind until they had ransomed themselves with
enormous sums. Thus was founded the great fortune which enabled
him to conspire with the Princes Yi and Cheng[5] for the supreme
power, and which led him eventually to his ruin. To this day, many of
his millions lie in the Palace vaults, to which they were carried after
his impeachment and death—millions carefully hoarded by Tzŭ Hsi
and buried during the Court’s flight and exile in 1900.
It was chiefly because of the advice of Su Shun that the Emperor
fled his capital at the approach of the Allies, in spite of the urgent
appeals of Yehonala and the Grand Council. By his advice also most
of the high officials and Metropolitan Ministers were prevented from
accompanying the Court, by which means the conspirators were
able to exercise steadily increasing influence over the Emperor, and
to prevent other advice reaching him. It was only the supreme
courage and intelligent grasp of the situation shown by Yehonala,
that frustrated the conspiracy at its most critical moment.
Immediately after the death of the Emperor, and while the plotters
were still undecided as to their final plans, she sent an urgent
message secretly to Prince Kung which brought him with all speed to
Jehol, where, by the help of Jung Lu and other loyal servants, she
put into execution the bold plan which defeated the conspiracy and
placed her at the head of China’s government. On the day when, the
game hopelessly lost, the usurping Regents found themselves in
Yehonala’s hands and heard her order their summary trial by the
Court of the Imperial Clan, Su Shun turned to his colleagues and
bitterly reproached them. “Had you but taken my advice and slain
this woman,” he said, “we should not have been in this plight to-day.”
To return, however, to the beginning of the conspiracy. At the
outset, the object of Prince Yi was to alienate the Emperor from the
influence of his favourite concubine, Yehonala. With this object they
informed him of the intrigue which, by common report, she was
carrying on with the young Officer of the Guards, Jung Lu, then a
handsome athletic man of about twenty-five. The Empress Consort
they regarded as a negligible factor, whose good-natured and
colourless personality took little interest in the politics of the day; but
if their plot was to succeed, Yehonala must either be dismissed from
the Court for good and all, or, at the very least, she must be
temporarily relegated to the “Cold Palace,” as is called the place
where insubordinate or disgraced concubines are isolated. They
knew that, however successful their plans at Jehol, there must
always be danger in the event of the Emperor returning to Peking,
where access to his person is not possible at all times for officials
(even those nearest to the Throne), whereas Yehonala would be in a
position, with the help of her eunuchs, to recover his favour and her
power. Emphasising, therefore, the alleged misconduct of the young
concubine, they quoted the precedent of a certain Empress Consort
of Ch’ien-Lung who, for less grievous disrespect (shown to the
Emperor’s mother), was imprisoned for life. Thus, by inventions and
suggestions, they so worked on the sick man’s mind that he finally
consented to have Yehonala’s infant son, the Heir Apparent,
removed from her care, and authorised the child’s being handed
over to the wife of Prince Yi, who was summoned to the hunting-
lodge Palace for that purpose. At the same time, the conspirators
thought it well to denounce Prince Kung to the Emperor, his brother,
accusing him of treachery, of conniving with the foreigners against
the Throne, and of abusing his powers as Plenipotentiary. Prince Yi
had been for years Prince Kung’s sworn enemy.
 The further intentions of the conspirators, instigated by Su Shun,
were to massacre all Europeans in the capital and to put to death, or
at least imprison for life, the Emperor’s brothers. Accordingly they
drafted in advance the Decrees necessary to justify and explain
these measures, intending to publish them immediately after the
Emperor’s death, which was now imminent. But here an unforeseen
obstacle presented itself, the first of many created for them by the
far-seeing intelligence of Yehonala; for they found that she had
somehow managed to possess herself of the special seal, which
inviolable custom requires to be affixed to the first Edict of a new
reign, in proof of validity of succession,—a seal, in the personal
custody of the Emperor, which bears the characters meaning
“lawfully transmitted authority.” Without this seal, any Decrees which
the usurpers might issue would lack something of legal finality and,
according to Chinese ideas, their subsequent cancellation would be
justifiable. But Prince Yi did not feel himself strong enough to risk a
crisis by accusing her or taking overt steps to gain possession of it.
Angry with his favourite concubine by reason of the reports of her
intimacy with Jung Lu, and his sickness ever increasing, the
Emperor lingered on in Jehol all the summer of that year, his duty in
the ancestral sacrifices at Peking being taken by Prince Kung. On
the 4th of the 6th Moon, the day before his thirtieth birthday, he
issued the following Decree in reply to a Memorial by the Court of
Astronomers, which had announced an auspicious conjunction of the
stars for the occasion:—

“Last month the Astronomers announced the appearance of

a comet in the north-west, which intimation we received as a
solemn warning of the impending wrath of Heaven. Now they
memorialise saying that the stars are in favourable
conjunction, which is doubtless a true statement, in no way
inspired by their desire to please us. But since we came to the
Throne, we have steadily refused to pay any attention to
auspicious omens, and this with good reason, in view of the
ever-increasing rebellions in the south and the generally
pitiable condition of our people. May the present auspicious
 conjunction of the stars portend the dawning of a happier day,
and may heaven permit a speedy end to the rebellion. In
token of our sincerity, we desire that the Astronomical Court
shall refrain from reporting to the Chronicler’s Office the
present favourable omen for inclusion in the annals of our
reign, so that there may be ascribed to us the merit of a
devout and sober mind.”

On the following morning the Emperor received the

congratulations of his Court in a pavilion of the Palace grounds, but
Yehonala was excluded from this ceremony. This was His Majesty’s
last appearance in public; from this date his illness became rapidly
worse.
On the 7th of the 7th Moon Yehonala contrived to despatch a
secret courier to Prince Kung at Peking, informing him of the critical
condition of his brother and urging him to send with all haste a
detachment of the Banner Corps to which the Yehonala clan
belonged. Events now moved swiftly. On the 16th, the Grand
Councillors and Ministers of the Presence, all adherents of Tsai
Yüan’s faction, entered the Emperor’s bedroom and, after excluding
the Empress Consort and the concubines, persuaded the Emperor to
sign Decrees appointing Tsai Yüan, Tuan Hua and Su Shun to be
Co-Regents upon his decease, with full powers. Yehonala was to be
expressly forbidden from exercising any form of control over the Heir
Apparent. As the necessary seal of State had been taken by
Yehonala and could not be found, these proceedings were irregular.
At dawn on the following day the Emperor died, and forthwith
appeared the usual valedictory Decree, prepared in advance by the
conspirators, whereby Tsai Yüan was appointed to be Chief Regent,
Prince Kung and the Empress Consort being entirely ignored.
In the name of the new Emperor, then a child of five, a Decree was
issued, announcing his succession, but it was observed to violate all
constitutional precedent in that it omitted the proper laudatory
references to the Imperial Consort. On the following day, however,
the Regents, fearing to precipitate matters, rectified the omission in
an Edict which conferred the rank of Empress Dowager both on the
Empress Consort and on Yehonala. The chroniclers aver that the
reason for this step lay in the Regents’ recognition of Yehonala’s
undoubted popularity with the troops (all Manchus) at Jehol, an
argument that weighed more heavily with them than her rights as
mother of the Heir Apparent. They hoped to rid themselves of this
condition of affairs after the Court’s return to Peking, but dared not
risk internal dissensions by having her removed until their positions
had been made secure at the capital. That they intended to remove
her was subsequently proved; it was evident that their position would
never be secure so long as her ambitious and magnetic personality
remained a factor of the situation: but it was necessary, in the first
instance, to ascertain the effect of the Regency at Peking and in the
provinces.
Tsai Yüan’s next move was to publish Decrees, in the names of
the Joint Regents, by virtue of which they assumed charge of the
Heir Apparent and by which the title of “Chien Kuo” (practically
equivalent to Dictator) was conferred on the Chief Regent, a title
heretofore reserved exclusively for brothers or uncles of the
Emperor.
When the news reached Peking, a flood of Memorials burst from
the Censorate and high officials. The child Emperor was implored to
confer the Regency upon the two Empresses, or, as the Chinese text
has it, to “administer the Government with suspended curtain.”[6]
Prince Kung and the Emperor’s other brothers were at this time in
secret correspondence with Yehonala, whom they, like the
Censorate, had already recognised as the master-mind of the
Forbidden City. They urged her to do all in her power to expedite the
departure of the funeral cortège for the capital. To secure this end, it
was necessary to proceed with the greatest caution and diplomacy,
for several of the late Emperor’s wives had been won over to the
side of the usurpers, who could also count on a certain number of
the Manchu bodyguard, their own clansmen. The influence of Su
Shun’s great fortune was also no inconsiderable factor in the
situation. The man was personally unpopular with the people of
Peking, because of his abuse of power and too frequent connection
with speculations in bank-note issues and cash, which cost the
citizens dear, but his vaults were known to be full to over-flowing,
and there is no city in the world where money buys more political
supporters than in Peking. Su Shun’s career has had its counterpart,
in everything except its sanguinary dénouement, in the capital to-
day.

Her Majesty Tzŭ Hsi in the Year 1903.

 At the moment the position of the Emperor’s family was
prejudiced, and the aims of the conspirators assisted, by the political
situation. With the capital occupied by foreign troops, and many of
the provinces in the throes of a great rebellion, the people might be
expected to welcome a change of rulers, and the ripe experience of
the usurping Regents in all matters of State was undeniable. But the
virile and untiring energies of Yehonala, ably supported by Jung Lu
and other faithful followers, soon put a new complexion on affairs,
and the situation was further modified in her favour by the success of
her nominee, the Commander-in-Chief, Tseng Kuo-fan, in capturing
the city of An-ch’ing (in Anhui) from the rebels, a victory that was
regarded as of good augury to her cause. Thereafter her courage
and diplomacy enabled her to play off one opponent against another,
gaining time and friends until the conspirators’ chance was gone.
Her own aims and ambitions, which had been voiced by her friends
in the Censorate, were, however, to some extent impeded by the fact
that a House-law of the Dynasty forbids the administration of the
Government by an Empress Dowager, while there were quite recent
precedents for a Regency by a Board, in the cases of the Emperors
Shun-Chih and K’ang-Hsi. In neither of these instances had the
Empress Tai-Tsung had any voice in the Government. The precedent
for Boards of official Regents had, however, come to be recognised
as inauspicious, because the several Regents of K’ang-Hsi’s
minority had either been banished or compelled to commit suicide. It
is probable, too, that Prince Kung, in instigating and supporting the
claims of the Empresses, failed to appreciate Yehonala’s strength of
character, and believed that a women’s Regency would leave the
supreme power in his own hands.
A Manchu, who accompanied the flight to Jehol, describing his
experiences, lays stress upon Yehonala’s unfailing courage and
personal charm of manner, to which was due her popularity with the
Imperial Guards and her eventual triumph. At the most critical period
of the conspiracy she was careful to avoid precipitating a conflict or
arousing the suspicions of the usurpers by openly conferring with
Jung Lu, and she employed as her confidential intermediary the
eunuch An Te-hai (of whom more will be heard later). By means of
this man daily reports were safely despatched to Prince Kung at
Peking, and, in the meanwhile, Yehonala affected an attitude of calm
indifference, treating Prince Yi with a studied deference which lulled
his suspicions.
On the 11th of the 8th Moon, the Board of Regents, after meeting
to discuss the situation, issued a Decree condemning in strong terms
a proposal put forward in a Memorial by the Censor, Tung Yüan-
ch’un, that the two Empresses should be appointed Co-Regents, and
referring to the death-bed Decree of the late Emperor as their own
warrant of authority. At the same time they announced, in the name
of the young Emperor, that the funeral cortège would start on its
journey to the capital on the second day of the next Moon. This was
the step for which Yehonala had been working and waiting. As
Ministers of the Presence, the Regents were perforce obliged to
accompany the coffin throughout the entire journey (some 150 miles)
to the capital, and the great weight of the catafalque, borne by one
hundred and twenty men, would necessarily render the rate of
progress very slow through the stony defiles of the hills. Resting
places would have to be provided at stages of about fifteen miles
along the route to shelter the Imperial remains and the attendant
officials by night, so that the Regents might count on a journey of ten
days at least, and longer in the event of bad weather. To the
Empresses, the slow progress of the cortège was a matter of vital
advantage, inasmuch as they were not to take part in the procession,
and, travelling ahead of it, could reach the capital in five days with
swift chair-bearers. Dynastic custom and Court etiquette prescribe
that upon the departure of the funeral procession, the new Emperor
and the consorts of the deceased sovereign should offer prayers and
libations, and should then press on so as to be ready to perform
similar acts of reverence on meeting the cortège at its destination.
Yehonala thus found herself in a position of great strategic
advantage, being enabled to reach the capital well in advance of her
enemies, and she speedily laid her plans with Prince Kung to give
them a warm reception.
Tsai Yüan and his colleagues were well aware that they were
placed at grave disadvantage in having to remain behind the young
Empress, with every prospect of serious trouble ahead; they,