Article
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.
Main ideas
- The study compares infants in a foundling home, physically cared for but almost without sustained human contact, with infants in a prison nursery raised by their own mothers.
- On the Viennese baby tests the foundling-home infants' developmental quotient declined steeply, while the nursery infants developed normally.
- Spitz locates the cause in the absence of maternal care, not in deficient food or hygiene.
- Hospitalism is reformulated as a psychiatric condition of emotional deprivation in the first year of life.
What it shows
- 1945
René Spitz reworked Hospitalism
The term was a paediatric one from the end of the nineteenth century; in his 1945 paper Spitz reformulated its causes, tracing the deterioration of institutionalised infants to the absence of a mother rather than to infection.