MedicalPhilately.com

   French psychiatrist Philippe Pinel (1745-1826) releasing lunatics from their chains at the Salpêtrière asylum in Paris in 1795

   At the beginning of the third French Republic, Tony-Robert Fleury painted "Pinel Frees the Madwomen". Fifty years after the death of Pinel, the painting strengthens his legend as the ‘liberator of the insane’. Fleury depicts Pinel supervising the removal of chains from an inmate. A woman inmate stands in the center surrounded by other people who give movement to the composition. A man  removes the last of the chains from around her waist.