In the nineteenth century British asylums were large-scale buildings with luxurious equipment; they showed an extraordinary cleanliness that only the asylums in Switzerland could match; they provided the inmates with good or very good nutrition; and statistical registration of the insane had attained an enviable quality. Family care in Scotland was a model for the whole of Europe.

This was the image that German psychiatrists visiting England and Scotland in the mid-nineteenth century had when they praised the British care of the insane. Such enthusiastic assessments were not only related to the mental health care system but also to surgery and public health. In 1836 the physician Adolf Mühry from Hanover praised English surgeons for their practical skills and pragmatic attitude. In 1873 the hygienist Max von Pettenkofer praised the English public health system and the sanitary conditions of British cities. The nineteenth-century British health care system was obviously seen as a highly attractive model for Germany. This view of British physicians resonated very well with a broader German cultural and political orientation toward the United Kingdom.

A mutual exchange of ideas between British and German psychiatrists in the second half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century has already been described by Max Neuburger more than half a century ago. He referred to the translations by German doctors of several British works on madness and related themes and, in a few cases, vice versa.