Monitoring Staff in St. Anne's Asylum in the End of the 19th Century

This article studies St-Anne's asylum as a workplace. The focus is on a forgotten trade in the French historiography of psychiatry : the << secondary >> staff, or << non-medical >> staff, which includes watch-mans, nurses, monitors, night watch-mans, hydrotherapy-staff and workshop-staffs members. The article analyses the tasks and obligations of the monitoring staff determined by institutional authorities. The monitoring staff appears as an actor of the daily life, privacy and physical treatments of patients, and intermediary (or mediator) between patients and doctors despite the therapeutic model of moral treatment which places the doctor in the centre of the therapy. As they where slowly becoming more aware of the crucial part of monitoring staff in the smooth running of therapies, the department and institutional authorities initiate his professionalization in the 1880s. Laicised, the watchman become little by little a nurse. The nursing school of St. Anne opens in 1882 and earns department status in 1886. Wages increase, pension fund is implemented. But the pace of work jeopardize efforts to stabilize the monitoring staff. A lot of monitoring staff members leave St. Anne's asylum after a few years of service only. The article invites to revamp internment and work experiences in asylum with an analysis of interactions between patients and monitoring staff members. The constant understaffing of monitoring, the obligation to watch and follow each patient every time and everywhere and to arbitrate dormitory quarrels wear the monitoring staff members out. The quasi-penitentiary surveillance offends the patients, who circumvent orders and play with rules. Slides of infantilization, humiliation and mistreatment are usual but denounced. But we shouldn't forget moments of pleasure, laugh and arrangements, which doesn't leave traces for historians.