Wilhelm Griesinger (1817-1868) · AuthorAuthor
Wilhelm Griesinger
1817-1868 · German psychiatrist who held that mental diseases are brain diseases
About Wilhelm Griesinger
Wilhelm Griesinger (1817-1868) was a German psychiatrist and neurologically minded physician whose maxim that mental diseases are brain diseases shaped later biological psychiatry. He worked in internal medicine, psychiatry, and hospital reform, and he helped found the Archiv fuer Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten. His textbook became a bridge between asylum psychiatry and medical neuropathology.
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Mental Pathology and TherapeuticsWilhelm Griesinger
1845 (English trans. 1867) · 19th Century · History
Griesinger gives nineteenth-century psychiatry a somatic and medical program. Mental Pathology and Therapeutics treats insanity as a disorder of the brain, even while admitting how little pathological anatomy could yet prove.