The term "psychiatry" came to Russia from Western Europe at the beginning of the XIX century. and spread in parallel with the opening of houses for the mentally ill. At the same time, the number of complex works on the history of the formation and development of the Institute of Russian Psychiatry in the XIX-XX centuries is extremely small. This book, which the author did not have time to finish writing because of his death in 1949, is considered the best and most informative on the history of psychiatry in Russia in the first half of the 20th century.