Elisa Kewitsch

since 2016
Doctoral scholarship holder of the Erfurt Doctoral and Postdoctoral Programme (EPPP) "History of Knowledge in the Modern Era"

since March 2015
Doctoral studies at the University of Erfurt, dissertation topic: ""...the endeavour of curing the fools..." – On the Production and Function of the Category of Healing in the Context of Psychiatric Practice at the Sonnenstein Sanatorium and Nursing Home in the First Half of the 19th Century 

2013 – 2016
Advisor to the Women's Representative of the Faculty of Philosophy at Friedrich Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg

2011 – 2012
Research assistant at the Chair of Early Modern History at the University of Augsburg as part of the research project "Euroscientia – Räume und Zirkulationen staatlichen Wissens in Europa 1750-1850" (funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Agence nationale de la recherche)

2008 – 2009
Student assistant at the Department of History at the University of Erfurt

2008 – 2012
Studied history at the Universities of Erfurt and Augsburg, topic of master's thesis: Von der Piratennation zur Seemacht – Kaperwesen und Piraterie als maritime Strategien des Britischen Empire im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert

2005 – 2008
Studied history and social sciences at the University of Erfurt, topic of bachelor's thesis: Pathologisierung als Mechanismus der Ausgrenzung von Devianz am Beispiel der Charity-Girls in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts

"...the endeavour of curing the fools..." – On the Production and Function of the Category of Healing in the Context of Psychiatric Practice at the Sonnenstein Sanatorium and Nursing Home in the First Half of the 19th Century

"Madness is curable!" This was the credo of the still young psychiatric sciences at the beginning of the 19th century in Europe. This healing maxim was also pursued in the Kingdom of Saxony when the first state sanatorium in the German-speaking world was opened there in 1811. But what exactly was the healing of mental illness all about? In which discursive structure did the idea of a possible cure emerge? Which actors were involved? What behaviours were associated with the predicate "cured"?

The aim of the project is to analyse the concept of healing in order to make statements about the constitution of bourgeois self-images and social ideals in a time of economic and social upheaval. In addition to contemporary scientific publications, the administrative and patient files of the Sonnenstein asylum will also be analysed using discourse analysis. Healing is not only considered within a scientific discourse, but is also understood as a social formation of knowledge. This knowledge was both the product of a specific discursive setting and the producer of new socially relevant norms, values and categories.

With the "endeavour to heal the fools", Sonnenstein became a micro-space of a powerful knowledge system, so that discourse history, knowledge history and micro-history are combined in this work. According to one thesis of the study, healing had a stabilising, regulative function within a society whose structure was undergoing change as a result of the Enlightenment and industrialisation.

“Ueberall herrscht Ordnung…” – Die Gründung der psychiatrischen Heilanstalt Sonnenstein als Spiegel neuer Wissensordnungen im frühen 19. Jahrhundert, in: Themenportal Europäische Geschichte, 2023. open access