The Contribution of the Rüdin School to Psychiatric Genetics: The Light and the Darkness.

Abstract

In this special issue, Kendler and Klee1 present for the first time English translations of 5 articles from the Rüdin school in Munich published in German between 1916 and 1933, together with commentaries on each article. These articles are of historical importance because they were among the first to systematically explore the inheritance of dementia praecox (schizophrenia) using state-of-the-art clinical and statistical approaches. The first2 was a study of risk in siblings. This was followed by pioneering studies of risk in offspring3 and nieces and nephews,4 by the first systematic twin study of schizophrenia5 and one of the first studies to explore clinical and etiological heterogeneity in schizophrenia using genetic data.6 In many ways, these articles are an important part of the foundations of modern psychiatric genetics and are valuable historical documents that remain relevant as the field grapples with some of the same issues faced by these pioneers. Kendler and Klee1 bring out many of these points in their scholarly commentaries.