If one thinks medicine, madness and the past, one image immediately pops into mind: that of the mental asylum. Following the famous work by Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, many historians have thus considered that the medicalization of insanity in the modern age had mostly led to a "great confinement" and a greater segregation of all individuals deemed mentally unfit during the "asylum era': However, new research demonstrates that this classic narrative of the psychiatric past needs to be revised. It discloses that, ever since the 191h century, a whole other medical culture existed as a challenge to asylums, a culture that advocated the integration of the mad and fought to disassociate psychiatry from the dominant model of confinement all throughout the occidental world. This article aims at presenting the results of these historical works that depict another aspect of the psychiatric history, exploring "boarding out" practices, instead of asylum ones.