Binswanger Klinik Bellevue in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland, founded in 1857, was a model psychiatric institution where social psychiatry was practiced as a therapeutic community for many decades, and psychoanalytic approaches were tested for their applicability to the theory and treatment of severely mentally ill patients. The book presents the first era of this clinic from 1857 to 1880 under Ludwig Binswanger Sr. and reports on a research project that examines the patient and administrative records of this clinic from medical and social historical perspectives. The focus is on the involved physicians with their biographies and concepts, but also on the patients' perspectives in terms of a bottom-up medical history.