Jean-Étienne Esquirol

Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol was born in Toulouse, France, in 1772 and completed his medical studies at Montpellier. In 1799 he came to Paris to work at the Salpêtrière hospital, where he became a favorite student of Philippe Pinel, who had campaigned for more humane treatment of people with mental illness. Around 1801 Esquirol opened a small private asylum in Paris, which became one of the best regarded in the city. His thesis of 1805 examined the passions as causes, symptoms and means of curing insanity. He believed, like Pinel, that mental illness rarely destroys a person's reason entirely. In 1810 he toured the asylums of France and reported on the bad conditions he found, and his reports contributed to a French law of 1838 that required each department to establish an asylum. He became chief physician at the Salpêtrière and later at the Charenton asylum, and he taught one of the first courses on mental illness. His book Mental Maladies (1838) gathered his clinical observations and classifications. He died in Paris in 1840.

Jean-Étienne Esquirol is also an author in the library: author page and works.

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