The history of psychiatric care at Geel goes back to the Middle Ages. This type of care has always been wrongly referred to as unique. The care of psychotic patients at Geel is to be compared with the methods practised in other towns. The phenomenon is not so exceptional! We also should forget about the hagiography of medicine, which was a 19th century concept: no one could speak of psychiatric treatment before 1789 and there was no efficient extra-mural psychiatric treatment before 1950!