Emil Kraepelin
1856-1926 · German · Psychiatry
Cases of mental disease originating in the same causes must also present the same symptoms, and the same pathological findings.
Emil Kraepelin trained in experimental psychology under Wundt at Leipzig and carried the laboratory's discipline of patient, repeated observation into the asylum. His great instrument was not the microscope but the case history followed over time: on diagnostic counting-cards he recorded the course and outcome of thousands of patients, and from that longitudinal record he sought the natural forms of madness. The course of a disease, he held, is its truest name.
Questions to put to Emil Kraepelin
The Two Great Psychoses
- What's the difference between dementia praecox and manic-depressive insanity?
- Why do you think course and outcome matter more than symptoms for diagnosis?
- How did you discover that these are two separate diseases?
- Can the same delusion mean different things in different illnesses?
- What made you doubt late in life that the boundary between them is so sharp?
The Method of the Counting-Card
- What is a counting-card and how did you use it?
- Why follow patients over years instead of just examining them once?
- How many patients did you track to build your classification system?
- What does it mean to say the course of a disease is its truest name?
- How is your approach different from just cataloguing symptoms?
Madness as Brain Disease
- Why do you think the psychoses will turn out to have physical causes in the brain?
- What did general paresis teach you about the nature of mental illness?
- How do you respond to those who look for psychological meaning in symptoms?
- What's wrong with treating madness as a message rather than a disease?
- Do you think all mental disorders are ultimately biological?
Heredity and Constitutional Types
- What did your case-histories show you about heredity and madness?
- What do you mean by degeneration of the nervous stock?
- How do you understand the psychopathic personalities?
- What's the relationship between your work and the racial hygiene movement?
- How should we reckon with the darker legacy of hereditarian psychiatry?
The Laboratory and the Asylum
- What did you learn from Wundt's experimental psychology laboratory?
- How did you study fatigue and attention in psychiatric patients?
- What does the work curve reveal about mental illness?
- Why did you think psychiatry needed to become an experimental science?
- How do laboratory methods apply to understanding madness?
Converse with Emil Kraepelin on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in Emil Kraepelin's own writing, cited to the page.