Jacques-Étienne Belhomme (1800–1880). Pionnier de la pédopsychiatrie et aliéniste oublié. Deuxième partie

Abstract

Jacques-Étienne Belhomme (1800–1880) was a 19th century alienist-physician, now mostly forgotten. Trained by Jean-Étienne Esquirol and an adept of phrenology, he was a pioneer in educating children with mental deficiencies and helped establish the field of pedopsychiatry. He played an active role in the clinical and anatomical-pathological isolation of general paralysis, tirelessly searching for a material substrate in the cerebral cortex for the mental alienation. This led him to propose a frontal localisation for language, although he did not explicitly determine its lateralisation. This biography recounts his personal and family history, far from ordinary, in the asylum founded by his father before the Revolution, where Philippe Pinel developed his nosology, which would become the foundation of contemporary psychiatry.