Die Rezeption Eugen Bleulers in Grossbritannien und Irland

Abstract

This paper draws on 60 years of British medical journals and psychiatry textbooks to indicate chronological stages of reception of Eugen Bleuler in Britain and Ireland. It highlights diverging paces of reception between journals and textbooks and attempts to make sense of this in light of other historical factors, above all early difficulties in reception of Emil Kraepelin in these countries. Bleuler was already well known across English Channel before 1911, year his schizophrenia book appeared, although this would not be translated into English until 1950. The academic journals, Brain, The Journal of Mental Science, The British Medical Journal and The Lancet, contained numerous references, mainly positive, to Bleuler and his work, with one even regarding him as the sanest of living psychiatrists. The psychiatry textbooks, however, were slower to integrate Bleuler's contribution. This article argues that this is not to be understood in terms of tension on Continent between academic and asylum psychiatry, nor as result of Bleuler's placing Freud on a par with Kraepelin, but as a consequence of British reaction to Kraepelin's Dementia praecox concept. While Craig, Stoddart and Cole took account of Kraepelin's classification, Conolly Norman's negative judgement in British Medical Journal in 1904 was reflected in textbooks by Clouston, Mercier, Savage and Tredgold. Bleuler's new term Schizophrenia made its first textbook appearance in 1912 with Stoddart recognising that name had been suggested for Kraepelin's illness, but first breakthrough came in 1926 when Craig not only mentioned Bleuler's name for first time in a textbook, but applied Bleuler's approach to his own nosology. Since 1927, Henderson and Gillespie privileged Bleuler's wider and less ominous conception of Dementia praecox and, from mid-1950s, standard British textbook of Mayer-Gross, Slater and Roth generally presupposed Bleuler's contribution.