The collections
Early in the twentieth century, some psychiatrists began to collect works by their patients: in Switzerland, Walter Morgenthaler, Hans Steck, Charles Ladame, Moritz Tramer; in Germany, Hans Prinzhorn. The oldest collection was started by Cesare Lombroso in Turin before 1880. At the beginning of the 20th century psychiatrists collected as researchers with a scientific, often diagnostic, interest. Sometimes, however, interest and enthusiasm for the unexpected beauty of the works came to the fore, as in the case of Walter Morgenthaler, who in 1921 wrote the monograph about the patient Adolf Wölfli: "Ein Geisteskranker als Künstler." („A mental patient as an artist“) and in the cases of Hans Steck and Aloise Corbaz.
For their research, however, psychiatrists generally turned their attention to other fields.
Patients also produced works in the mental hospitals "Burghölzli" in Zurich, in Rheinau (Zurich), in Königsfelden (Brugg), Münsterlingen (Thurgau) and other places, which were selectively preserved by nurses and warders. The little-known collections and all kinds of odds and ends are acutely endangered because hardly anyone knows how numerous or how valuable they are. Such works are therefore in many cases improperly stored and thus soon disposed of if not actually thrown away whenever building alterations and the demolition of old buildings for the construction of new buildings makes this necessary.