Mental disease in Malta

Abstract

At the dawn of the third millennium, if we compare our age of information and rapid medical and technological discoveries with medical and psychiatric practices of two hundred years ago, it is difficult for us to imagine life in a psychiatric institution of the midnineteenth century. It is difficult to understand how the medical and psychiatric professionals of the 1800s could keep themselves abreast with psychiatric breakthrough developments happening elsewhere in the world. Notwithstanding, by the late nineteenth century, the work and dedication of the psychiatric professionals at Mount Carmel Hospital (at that time known as the Lunatic Asylum), was recognized and held in high esteem.