Griesinger, Wilhelm

Abstract

German internist and psychiatrist Wilhelm Griesinger (1817–68) published his magnum opus, Pathologie und Therapie der Psychischen Krankheiten (The Pathology and Treatment of Mental Diseases) in 1845. Here he described clinical syndromes of mental illness based on pathological studies and psychological analyses. Griesinger recognized that mental illness resulted from dysfunction of the brain, and that mental illnesses could be organized into several different categories. Griesinger is most remembered for beginning the development of biologically oriented psychiatry and for his reforms concerning the care of the mentally ill and the asylum system. He established the modern model of psychiatry focused on patient care, teaching, and research, and promoted a movement away from traditional custodialism. In an era when mentally ill patients typically spent most of their lives in rural asylums, he supported the integration of the mentally ill into society, with short-term hospitalization in local community facilities as necessary, combined with the close cooperation of family caregivers and available community support systems. In Berlin he established two influential journals: Medicinisch-Psychologische Gesellschaft and the Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten, also known as Griesinger's Archives. Griesinger also contributed to our understanding of the muscular dystrophies and summarized the clinical features of pseudohypertrophic muscular dystrophy in 1865, several years before Guillaume Benjamin Amand Duchenne de Boulogne (1806–75).