Hospitalism: An Inquiry into the Genesis of Psychiatric Conditions in Early Childhood

In this paper, the first of two inquiries into the genesis of psychiatric conditions in early childhood, René Spitz compares two groups of infants. One lived in a foundling home, where the infants were fed and kept clean but had almost no sustained contact with a caregiver. The other lived in a prison nursery and were cared for by their own mothers. Measured with the Viennese baby tests, the developmental quotient of the foundling-home infants fell sharply and they showed the signs of hospitalism, while the nursery infants developed normally. Spitz attributes the difference to the absence of maternal care. He thereby recasts hospitalism, whose cause had been sought in infection and hygiene, as a psychiatric condition produced by emotional deprivation in the first year of life.