A 19th-century psychiatrist or physician specializing in mental illness and insanity; a doctor treating patients whose minds were considered alienated from reality.
From alienism + -ist (a suffix forming nouns for practitioners of a field). Literally means a specialist in alienation or alien minds, reflecting Victorian psychiatric terminology.
Famous 19th-century alienists like Jean-Pierre Falret and Dorothea Dix used this title proudly—it eventually fell out of use as psychiatry became the standard term, but alienist perfectly captured the era's view of mental illness as estrangement.
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