The Clinic

From the very beginning of the novel the reader is told that Pilgrim is taken to Burghölzli Psychiatric clinic in Sweden. In order to gain a better understanding of the setting in this novel I had to go onto the internet and do some research into what the Burghölzli Psychiatric clinic was like. First off, I learned that ‘Burghölzli’ was the name given to the psychiatric hospital located inside of the University of Zürich, Switzerland, and that ‘Burghölzli’ is a wooded hill in the district of Riesbach of southeastern Zürich. The clinic was created in the 1860s for the humane treatment of the mentally ill. From 1870 until 1879, the hospital had three directors, Bernhard von Gudden, Gustav Huguenin and Eduard Hitzig. All three men practiced medicine from a biological basis, with brain pathology and physiology being the general focus of their research. It wasn’t until the fourth director Auguste-Henri Forel took charge that the hospital gained a reputation in the medical world.