Ste.-Anne Mental Hospital

   (1867), Paris.

   Given that at mid-nineteenth century, the Seine department (Paris) disposed of only two mental hospitals, Bicêtre and the Salpêtrière, in 1860 Baron Georges Haussmann (1809–1891), the prefect of the Seine, ordered a commission to consider the reform of institutional care. Two years later, the administration of the department decided to build a central asylum in Paris at the Ste.-Anne "farm" where clinical teaching would take place and where a separate building would house the admissions service. (The Ste.-Anne farm had previously been an annex of Bicêtre hospital for agricultural work for the mentally ill.) In 1867, the new Ste.-Anne mental hospital was opened, and Valentin Magnan and his medical-school friend Louis-Gustave Bouchereau (1835–1900) were placed in charge of the emergency department, which turned out to be an immense fountain of psychiatric pathology given that many of the desperately ill patients in the city of Paris, referred from the emergency department of the prefecture of police (called L’infirmerie spéciale), passed through it. The admissions service also received patients from the Paris general hospitals (l’Assistance publique) and direct admissions via the patients’ families. From the admissions department of Ste.-Anne, the patients would be redistributed to the other psychiatric hospitals in the Seine department, including the Ste.-Anne teaching service. Among the professors of psychiatry in the teaching service until the Second World War were Benjamin Ball (1833–1893), who initiated instruction in 1879 in the newly founded (1877) "chair of mental and brain diseases" ("maladies mentales et de l’encéphale"); Alix Joffroy (1844–1908), who held the chair until his death; Gilbert-Louis-Siméon Ballet (1853–1916), who is remembered for precise descriptions of chronic hallucinatory psychosis (1911) (see French Chronic Delusional States) and other nervous disorders, in office until his death; Ernest-Ferdinand-Pierre-Louis Dupré (1862–1921), whose major contribution is the délire d’imagination (1910) (see French Chronic Delusional States), also died in office; Henri Claude, who retired from the chair in 1939 and the following year brought out, with Pierre Rubenovitch, a major guide to the physical therapies, Thérapeutiques biologiques des affections mentales (Biological Treatments of Mental Illness); Paul-Marie-Maxime Laignel-Lavastine (1875–1953), who coined the term "endocrine psychiatry" (1908), retired at reaching the age limit in 1942; Joseph Levy-Valensi (1879–1943), elected Laignel’s replacement by the Faculty in 1942 despite his Jewish origins— Levy-Valensi was never permitted to begin teaching and died in Auschwitz in 1943; thereafter Jean Delay offered interim instruction in psychiatry until his own ascension to the chair in 1946; the chair was modified at Delay’s retirement in 1970 (see Pierre Deniker), and Pierre Pichot continued on as head.