Preobrazhensky mental hospital was the first specialized psychiatric institution in Moscow, opened in 1808. The Museum was organized in 1970, but since 2019 it has two permanent employees engaged in research work and designing a new exhibition. Objects from the Museum's collections reveal an extremely interesting, but still almost unknown history of Russian and Soviet psychiatry.

    The Museum funds include unique documents: memoirs and personal papers of psychiatrists, minutes of hospital sessions, hospital reports, scientific papers and unpublished manuscripts, photographs, medical histories, art brut and patients' handicraft, and much more. The museum's archive also contains personal funds of outstanding psychiatrists (V.A. Gilyarovsky, P.B. Gannushkin, M.A. Dzhagarov, etc.). These documents and artifacts may be of interest to a wide audience: they shows the daily life of the hospital, the fate of doctors, nurses and patients, the development of psychiatry as a profession and science