Complete Record - Heirs of Hippocrates No. 1838

WILHELM GRIESINGER (1817-1868) Traité des maladies mentales. Adrien Delahaye 1865 vii [1] 592, 16 pp. 23 cm.

Griesinger, born in Stuttgart, was a physician and psychiatrist who made significant contributions to psychiatry, pathology, and infectious diseases. He recognized the contributions of Pinel and Esquirol in the preface to the present work, and was among the first German psychiatrists to insist on treating the insane more humanely. He founded the Archiv für Physiologische Heilkunde and the Society for Medical Psychology. Griesinger described pseudohypertrophic muscular dystrophy, was the first to describe infantile splenic anemia, and wrote an important text on infectious diseases. His many medical interests led him to search for important relationships between neurology and psychiatry. He worked to correlate the neurophysiological work of Hall (see No. 1462 ff.) on the reflex function of the medulla with his own theories as well as those of such investigators as Johann Herbart (1776-1841). At the time Griesinger published Pathologie und Therapie der psychischen Krankheiten in 1845, he was twenty-eight years of age. Being a pathologist, and having made extensive studies on the pathology of the brain, his belief was that mental derangement was primarily a neurophysiological disturbance based on organic changes to the brain. He convincingly pointed out the personality changes and social maladaptive defects which often follow brain damage. "Without question he was influential in dissipating the widespread interest in dynamic psychology evidenced in the work of the Romantic psychologists of the first half of the nineteenth century" (Franz G. Alexander and Sheldon T. Selesnick, The history of psychiatry. New York, 1966. p. 152). An appendix by Jules Gabriel François Baillarger (1806-1891), containing his comments on general paralysis, is missing from the University of Iowa Libraries' copy. Baillarger, a noted French neurologist, made a number of important contributions to neurology and served at the Sâlpetrière Lunatic Asylum in Paris for many years. This French edition was translated from the second German edition of 1861 by the French physician, Doumic, who taught at the medical school in Poissy.

See Related Record(s): 1462

Cited references: Garrison-Morton 4930 (1st German ed., 1845); Waller 3744 (4th German ed., 1876)

Gift of John Martin, M.D.