The Vanderbilt University hosts the Sixty-Second Annual Meeting of the Society for French Historical Studies on its campus in Nashville, Tennessee from Thursday March 3 through Sunday March 6, 2016. Several papers address the history of psychiatry.

Realms of Mind: Psychiatry, Medicine, and Mental Health in Modern France

Chair: Camille Robcis, Cornell University
Comment: Richard Keller, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Elizabeth Nelson, Indiana Medical History Museum, “Stone Clubs Crafted by Patients’: Art and Violence at the Musée de la folie”
Benoit Majerus, University of Luxembourg, “A ‘chemical revolution’ from below: The ‘Invention’ of the First Neuroleptic1 in the Paris of the 1950s”
Jonathyne Briggs, Indiana University Northwest, “Storming the Fortress: L’Affaire Bettelheim and the Debate over Psychoanalytic Treatment of Autism in France”

Madhouses, Courthouses, and Clinics: Medicine and Gender in Context, 1750-1850

Chair: Sarah Fishman, University of Houston
Comment: Rachel Chrastil, Xavier University

Jessie Hewitt, Marymount University, “Family (Mis)Fortunes: Inheritance and the Insane Asylum in Balzac’s France”
Jillian Slaight, University of Wisconsin-Madison, “‘Old Girls:’ Age and Sexual Maturity as Standards of Innocence in Eighteenth-Century French Justice”
Sun-Young Park, George Mason University, “For Health and Beauty: Orthopedics and Girls’ Physical Education in the Romantic Era”

Negotiating Violence in Twentieth Century Algeria

Chair: Linda Lierheimer, Hawai’i Pacific University
Comment: Margaret Cook Andersen, University of Tennessee-Knoxville

June Hyuck Choi, Independent Scholar, “Race, Development, and the Spectacle of the Colonial City: Postcolonial Disparity and the Planning of Algiers’ New and Old Cities”
Paul Marquis, Yale University, “Everyday Violence and Mental Health Nursing in a Colonial Psychiatric Hospital (Algeria, 1933-1963)”

Governmentality, Regulation, and Reform for the Public “Good”

Chair and Comment: Jotham Parsons, Duquesne University

Christine Zabel, Harvard University, “Anticipatory Practices or Immoral Ventures? Speculation and Life-Insurance Around 1800”
Misha Avrekh, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, “Statistical Melodrama: Performing Governance in the Absence of Government in the French Countryside, 1800-1840”
Sara Black, Rutgers University, “Medicating Madness: Drugs and (Dis)order in French Psychiatric Wards”