Les biographies de psychiatres

Abstract

The biographies of psychiatrists have been in the 19th century panegyrics, pronounced during the funeral or necrologies evoking the career and the publications of the deceased. The successive secretaries of the medico-psychological society, Auguste Motet and then Antoine Ritti, have written many texts with accurate information on the life and works of the first French alienists. They have been gathered in books, published in 1894 and in 1913–1914. The specialist of the psychiatric biography at the beginning of the 20th century is René Sémelaigne (1855–1934), descendant of the Pinel family by his mother. He has written a reference book during half a century: The pioneers of the French psychiatry before and after Pinel (2 tomes, 1930 and 1932), including notices about 97 personalities from the 16th to the 20th century (22 before Pinel, 75 after). They were physicians, alienists or specialists of internal medicine having contributed to the clinic of neurosis. A detailed bibliography (books and articles), almost exhaustive, of each author is presented in annex of his notice. The chapters are rather hagiographic. The texts are based on the quest for forerunners and the positivist illusion of uninterrupted progress. Psychiatric journals have published in 1950 and in 1973 some issues with articles on the life and works of famous alienists. After Michel Foucault's Histoire de la Folie (1961), the biographies are more critical. The suicides of Clérambault and more recently of Marcé are clearly related. The Biographic Dictionary of Pierre Morel (1984) include about 270 notices (350 in the edition of 1996) of French and foreign personalities, not only physicians, but also psychoanalysts, philanthropists and patients. For the first time, women are present in a psychiatric dictionary. Like Kraepelin, some psychiatrists have written theirs memoirs at the end of the 20th century (Baruk, Debray-Ritzen). Others have answered in the journal International Psychiatry (1993) to the questionnaire: why have you chosen the psychiatry? In the 1990s, several books have been written on the life of alienists and psychiatrists that have marked their time, either by physicians (Marcé, Dide, Heuyer, Ey), or by historians (Pinel, Toulouse, Clérambault). For others, it is a collective book by several contributors (Esquirol, Moreau de Tours, Minkowski, Delay). Personalities belonging to neurology and psychiatry have also inspired biographies (Bourneville, Alzheimer, Gilles de la Tourette). Since 2004, a Biographical dictionary, initiated by Joseph Biéder, is published in the issues of the Annales Médico-Psychologiques, the most ancient French psychiatric journal, created in 1843. In 2020, it includes 86 notices, written by 16 contributors. The personalities are alienists, psychiatrists, neuropsychiatrics and physicians interested by the psychiatry during the 19th and the 20th centuries. The evolution of the biography from the panegyric to the critical contribution, for example in the case of Clérambault, question about its function and about the relationship between the works of an author and his life.