[To lock up madness.]

In New France, Madness has initially been considered according to European traditions : lunatics had to be excluded, taken out of sight. Very soon though, a distinction was made between the function of protection, attributed to general hospitals and later to asylums, and the function of treatment, undertaken by the Hôtel-Dieu (fore-shadowing the role played by general hospitals in the twentieth century). In 1960, changing concepts in the fields of the aetiology and treatment of mental illness, the hugeness of mental hospitals and the transformation of Quebec society from rural to urban hasten the re-organization of psychiatric services, without eliminating the risk of excluding the mentally ill. This paper also describes briefly psychiatric hospitals and their dependencies in the early sixties in Quebec.