History of Neuropsychiatry

The main goal of the conference was to assess the research on useful films made during the first half of the 20th century by neurologists and psychiatrists in Europe for clinical, educational and archival purposes. Long marginalized by the historiography remained in the shadow of the entertainment cinema and the “auteur film”, the useful film refers to a vast set of productions that tackle the cinema through its uses and its performative dimension. Partly escaping commercial theatrical release, useful films are characterized by a large variety of formats, forms and functions, but also a diversity of production, distribution and reception contexts. Their pragmatic and ephemeral nature requires considering the context in which these films are elaborated, but also the discourses that surround them and the practices that determine them.

Drawing on the work of Acland and Wasson, the notion of useful film refers to how institutions conceive and engage with the tool of cinema. “The concept of useful cinema does not so much name a mode of production, a genre, or an exhibition venue as it identifies a disposition, an outlook, and an approach toward a medium on the part of institutions or institutional agents.” (Acland & Wasson 2011, 4). We therefore use this notion as an approach to cinema oriented by the needs of the actors in the field of neurology and psychiatry.

One of the scopes of the conference was to construct, through case studies, a panorama of the practices that are quite diversified (even if film supporting medical research prevails), but also to bring out new approaches or lines of research that are relevant for thinking about this type of audio-visual document. The contributions focused on films made in France (Jean Comandon), Italy (Gaetano Rummo and others), Great Britain (Wellcome collections), Germany (Ludwig Mayer), Belgium (Van Gehuchten and others), the Netherlands (Magnus-Rademaker), Spain (Antonio Subirana) and Switzerland (Walter R. Hess, Ernst Grünthal).

This paper will explore the military medical response to nervous disorders in the Royal Flying Corps. The war in the air exposed pilots to considerable nervous strain, but their unique experiences have been overlooked in favour of ‘trauma’ in infantrymen. Using the military medical collections of the RAF Museum and National Archives, this paper will show that flyers were believed to be medically different, and what set them apart from the men in the trenches was their unique employment.

Papez was one the greatest twentieth-century explorers
of brain anatomy. In an effort to explain emotions in
the brain, he proposed the existence of a complex set of
circuits. Some of the connections proposed were purely
speculative because the techniques available at the time
were not capable of revealing the detailed connectivity of
the brain. The Papez circuit, as it came to be called, was
one of the first examples of a network or systems-level
explanation of a complex mental function. His speculations
about brain wiring, when evaluated with modern
techniques, have turned out to be amazingly accurate.
Although his theory of the emotional functions of the circuit
turned out to not be correct, it was of great heuristic
value and led to much research. All subsequent
approaches to the emotional brain build upon the Papez
circuit theory.