[A leading figure in psychiatric care before the field became professionalized: Jean-Baptiste Pussin].

The figure of Jean-Baptiste Pussin defies the categories of the history of professions. Neither fully assignable to a specific status nor reducible to a fixed role, he eludes the usual frameworks upon which disciplinary narratives are constructed. By adopting a function-based approach, it becomes possible to shed light on what categories of status or profession leave in the shadows: a set of situated, relational, and organizational practices at the heart of the emergence of psychiatric care.