Emil Kraepelin: Founding Modern Psychiatry and the Biological Approach to Mental Disorders

Emil Kraepelin, born on February 15, 1856, in Neustrelitz, Germany, is often hailed as the father of modern psychiatry. His pioneering work laid the foundation for contemporary psychiatric classification systems, which continue to influence the field today. Kraepelin’s early education was profoundly shaped by his brother Karl, a biologist, whose influence sparked Emil’s interest in the biological basis of mental disorders. This early exposure to scientific thinking played a crucial role in shaping Kraepelin's later views on mental illness, particularly his belief that psychological disorders could have biological and genetic origins.

Kraepelin pursued medical studies at the University of Leipzig and the University of Würzburg, where he was deeply influenced by prominent figures such as Wilhelm Wundt, one of the founders of experimental psychology. Wundt's emphasis on rigorous scientific methods resonated with Kraepelin, who integrated these principles into his own research. This background set Kraepelin apart from his contemporaries, as he applied a scientific approach to the study of mental disorders, focusing on their biological and genetic underpinnings. After earning his medical degree in 1878, Kraepelin embarked on a career in psychiatry, where he sought to establish psychiatry as a rigorous medical discipline rather than a speculative or philosophical one.

In 1883, Kraepelin published his seminal work, Compendium der Psychiatrie, where he introduced a groundbreaking classification system for mental disorders. He made a critical distinction between exogenous disorders, which were caused by external factors and considered treatable, and endogenous disorders, which he believed were rooted in biological causes and were often incurable. This classification laid the groundwork for the modern understanding of psychiatric conditions and reflected Kraepelin's belief in the importance of scientific observation and categorization in the treatment and study of mental illness.

Kraepelin’s most notable contribution to psychiatry was his differentiation between manic-depressive illness (now known as bipolar disorder) and dementia praecox (now known as schizophrenia). This distinction was revolutionary, as it emphasized the importance of systematic clinical observation and classification in psychiatry, helping to move the field away from vague and generalized diagnoses toward a more structured and scientifically grounded approach. His work influenced the development of subsequent diagnostic manuals, including the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), which continues to guide psychiatric diagnosis and treatment today.

Kraepelin’s influence extended well beyond his lifetime, shaping the field of psychiatry throughout the 20th century and beyond. He passed away on October 7, 1926, in Munich, leaving behind a legacy that continues to impact mental health research and treatment. Kraepelin's emphasis on the biological basis of mental disorders laid the foundation for future research in psychopharmacology and neuropsychiatry, cementing his place as a central figure in the history of psychiatry.
Emil Kraepelin: Founding Modern Psychiatry and the Biological Approach to Mental Disorders

Alois Alzheimer - Clinical psychiatrist and neuroanatomist

Alois Alzheimer was born on June 14, 1864, in the town of Marktbreit in Lower Franconia, near Würzburg on the river Main, into a Catholic family.

He attended elementary school in Marktbreit and later pursued a classical secondary education in Aschaffenburg. Upon completing school, Alzheimer enrolled as a college student in Berlin, Freiburg, and Würzburg from 1883 to 1885. Excelling in sciences, he continued his studies in medicine at various universities, including Berlin, Aschaffenburg, Tübingen, and Würzburg, where he obtained his medical degree in 1887.

In 1901, he started working at the state asylum in Frankfurt am Main, where he developed a strong interest in brain research and neurological disorders. It was during this time that his life took a significant turn when he encountered a 51-year-old female patient named Auguste Deter, who suffered from short-term memory loss, expressing her distress by saying, 'I have lost myself.' Tragically, her condition deteriorated into severe dementia, and she passed away at the age of 55.

After her death, Alzheimer conducted an autopsy on her brain and made a groundbreaking discovery of malformed protein clumps (later known as plaques) and tangled bundles of fibers (referred to as tangles). These plaques and tangles are still recognized as the primary characteristics of Alzheimer's disease. Additionally, the loss of neural connections in the brain is another notable feature.

On November 3, 1906, at the 37th Meeting of South-West German Psychiatrists in Tübingen, Alois Alzheimer presented his findings on a "peculiar severe disease process of the cerebral cortex."

During his presentation, Alzheimer described an 'unusual disease of the cerebral cortex' that affected a 51-year-old woman named Auguste Deter. The disease caused symptoms of memory loss, disorientation, and hallucinations until her atypical death at the age of fifty. His report detailed the distinct plaques and neurofibrillary tangles observed in the brain histology.

Emil Kraepelin, a German psychiatrist collaborating with Alzheimer, later formalized his colleague's findings in 1910. He coined the term "Alzheimer's disease" in the second volume of the German book General Psychiatry, marking the first description of this specific form of dementia that gradually erodes memory and cognitive abilities.

Alongside his colleague Franz Nissl, Alzheimer dedicated subsequent years to an extensive six-volume study titled 'Histologic and Histopathologic Studies of the Cerebral Cortex,' providing a comprehensive account of nervous system pathology. The work was ultimately published between 1907 and 1918.

In 1913, while on his way to assume the position of chair of the psychology department at Friedrich-Wilhelm University in Breslau, Germany, Alzheimer fell ill with a severe cold complicated by endocarditis. Unfortunately, he never fully recovered and passed away in 1915 at the age of 51.
Alois Alzheimer - Clinical psychiatrist and neuroanatomist

Immanuel Kant: German philosopher

Immanuel Kant was born at Königsberg on the 22nd of April 1724. His grandfather was an emigrant from Scotland, and the name Cant is not uncommon in the north of Scotland, whence the family is said to have come.

His father Johann Georg Kant (1682-1746) was a German craftsman from Memel. Kant’s German mother, who herself had come from a family of saddle makers, was a wholly uneducated though highly intelligent woman. As such, she would prove to be young Immanuel’s greatest source of inspiration.

Kant received a stern education — strict, punitive, and disciplinary — that favoredLatin and religious instruction over mathematics and science. In his tenth year he was entered at the Collegium Fredericianum with the definite view of studying theology.

At the age of eighteen, Kant was admitted into the University of Königsberg where he took up an education in theology. Although his education was financed for the most part by the local Pietist community, Kant was able to earn extra money while working as a tutor for some of his less acute classmates.

After graduating, he was given the position of junior lecturer at the University. During his early years at the University, Kant published works on a wide array of topics, including treatises on geography, astronomy, meteorology, and anthropology.

In 1770 he obtained the chair of logic and metaphysics at Konigsberg, and delivered as his inaugural address the dissertation De mundi sensibilis et intelligibilis forma et principiis.

Eleven years later appeared the Kritik of Pure Reason, the work towards which he had been steadily advancing, and of which all his later writings are developments. Although now uniformly recognized as one of the greatest works in the history of philosophy, this Critique was largely ignored upon its initial publication.

The 1790 Critique of Judgment (the third Critique)applied the Kantian system to aesthetics and teleology. He also wrote a number of semi-popular essays on history, religion, politics and other topics.

According to Kant, philosophy is the result of human reasoning. He reasoned about metaphysics, intelligible objects, and ethics. Kant's health, long poor, turned for the worse and he died in 1804.
Immanuel Kant: German philosopher

Karl Abraham - German psychoanalyst

Karl Abraham (3 May 1877 – 25 December 1925) was born in Bremen, Germany, into a well-to-do, highly cultured, and well-established family. He studied biology and medical subjects from 1896-1901 at Würzburg, Berlin and other universities. His major interest was biology and his dissertation topic was the anatomical development of parrots.

After completing his medical studies, he became deeply interested in philology and linguistics. He spoke five languages, read several others, and even psychoanalyzed some patients in English.

From 1901-04 he worked as an assistant at the Berlin Municipal Asylum. While serving as an assistant to the psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler at the Burghölzli Mental Hospital in Zürich (1904–07), Abraham met the psychoanalyst Carl Jung and was introduced to the ideas of Sigmund Freud.

He entered psychoanalytic practice in Berlin (1907), where he helped to establish the first branch of the International Psychoanalytic Institute (1910).

Abraham was the first psychoanalyst in Germany, where he brought about a great flourishing of psychoanalysis. His clinical-theoretical contributions quickly became classics that have powerfully influenced the development of psychoanalytic theory.

His first psychoanalytic paper, presented in 1907, was entitled “Über die Bedeutung sexueller Jugendträumen für die Symptomatologie der Dementia Praecox” (“On the Significance of Sexual Trauma in Childhood for the Symptomatology of Dementia Praecox”).

His work on dreams enriched the understanding of myths and symbols, and he was a pioneer of the study of war neuroses.

Abraham was fascinated by the various stages of psychosexual development, suggesting greater differentiation in libido development and postulating the connection between disturbance in psychosexual development and psychosis.

With the 1912-13 Zürich dissensions of Jung and others, Abraham became a member of the Inner Committee (see Freud chronology, 1912). He performed medical service in the First World War and, along with Ernst Simmel, (1882-1947), would develop postwar treatment for sufferers of so-called "war neuroses."
Karl Abraham - German psychoanalyst

Keitel, Wilhelm Bodewin Johann Gustav

From a middle-class landowning family, Wilhelm Keitel served in the artillery and as a staff officer during World War I.

Wilhelm Keitel was born near Bad Gandersheim in what is today the state of Lower Saxony, Germany, on September 22, 1882. He embarked on a military career in 1901, becoming a Cadet Officer of the Prussian Army. His rise through the ranks continued during and after the First World War.

In 1909, Keitel married Lisa Fontaine, a wealthy landowner's daughter from Hanover. Together they had six children, one of whom died in infancy.

In September 1914 Keitel was seriously wounded by a shell splinter. After returning to duty, he became a battery commander before being appointed to the General Staff in March 1915. He fought in the First Battle of the Marne, at the Eastern Front, in the Battle of Verdun, and the Battle of Passchendaele, being awarded the Iron Cross 2nd and 1st Class.

After the Nazis took power in January 1933 Keitel participated in the expansion of the Reich Defense Ministry. In 1938, Keitel was appointed head of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces, that agency which replaced the German War Ministry and which bore responsibility over the army, navy, and air force. He held that post until the end of World War II. Keitel participated in all major conferences, dictated the terms of the French surrender in June 1940.

On 8 May 1945 he signed the unconditional surrender of the German armed forces in Berlin. He was convicted of crimes against humanity, by international Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and hanged on October 16, 1946.
Keitel, Wilhelm Bodewin Johann Gustav

Hieronymus Wolf: Father of German Byzantium Studies

German humanist scholar, Hieronymus Wolf (13 August 1516 - 8 October 1580) was born in Oettingen and studied under Melanchthon and Camerarius.

He lived during the reign of Emperor Charles V (1516-1555) and the subsequent division of the Habsburg Spanish Empire between Philip II (heir to the ’Spanish’ holdings) and Ferdinand I, who took over the German hereditary lands, Bohemia and the north of Hungary.

Wolf saw the Great Peasants War of 1525 as a child of nine years. In 1551 he became secretary and librarian to the Fugger family in Augsburg. From 1551 to 1557 he was professor od Greek in the gymnasium of Augsburg, which with some other offices he held until his death in 1580.

Wolf was a man of very extensive learning and particularly distinguished for his knowledge of Greek, which is said to have written with greater facility than Latin.

The first use of the term "Byzantine" to label the later years of the Roman Empire was in 1557, when Hieronymus Wolf published his work Corpus Historiæ Byzantinæ, a collection of historical sources.

Hieronymus Wolf died in the free imperial city of Augsburg.
Hieronymus Wolf: Father of German Byzantium Studies

Max Weber: German sociologist

Max Weber (21 April 1864 – 14 June 1920) best known for his thesis of the “Protestant ethic,” relating Protestantism to capitalism, and for his ideas on bureaucracy. Maximilian Carl Emil “Max” Weber was born in the Prussian city of Erfurt.

His father was a lawyer and member of a family of prosperous textile manufacturers. His mother's family placed a high value on education.

Educated mainly at the universities of Heidelberg and Berlin, Weber was trained in law, eventually writing his Habilitationsschrift on Roman law and agrarian history under August Meitzen, a prominent political economist of the time.

Max Weber is credited with numerous contributions to modern sociology and is considered one of the pillars of the discipline along with Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim.

Max Weber’s first significant The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, appeared shortly after his recovery from a long period of depression lasting from 1897 to 1904.

In 1919 he took permanent Chair in Munich. He lectured in overflowing lecture theatres on basic concepts in sociology, on economic history and on political science.
Max Weber: German sociologist

Klaus Barbie (1913-1991)

Klaus Barbie was the SS captain known as “the butcher of Lyons,” who headed the anti-Resistance operations in France during the Nazi occupation.

Born in Bad Godesberg, a quit town on the Rhine, on October 25, 1913, Nikolaus ‘Klaus’ Barbie was the son of two schoolteachers. Barbie did poorly in school except for his fluency in languages, a skill that would later serve him well during the war and later in exile.

He joined the Hitler Youth and became so enthralled by the party’s ideology that he even volunteered for six months of hard labor at the party’s work camp of Schleswig-Holstein.

After Germany invaded France, Barbie became head of anti-resistance efforts there. As head of the Gestapo in Lyon he was responsible for actions against French Jews, and in one raid of a Jewish orphanage 44 boys and girls were sent to Auschwitz.

Nikolaus ‘Klaus’ Barbie

He personally tortured prisoners whom he interrogated. He was personally responsible for the arrest, torture and death of Jean Moulin, a senior leader of the French resistance.

Barbie was ruthless and fanatical and regularly used torture in his interrogation of prisoners. Just before Lyon was liberated Barbie fled to Germany where he was employed and protected by the US Army’s Counterintelligence Corps from 1946 to 1951, because of his police skills and anti-Communist zeal.

Later Barbie with his wife and children escaped to South America and eventually took up residence in Bolivia where h obtained citizenship in 1957.

He was ultimately convicted of war crimes committed in Nazi-occupied France but not before having enjoyed a life on the run, facilitated with some degree of US connivance.
Klaus Barbie (1913-1991)

Angela Merkel

Angela Merkel (born in 1954), the first woman chancellor of Germany. Born Angel Dorothea Kasner on 17 July 1954 in Hamburg, she became the first woman chancellor of Germany on 22 November 2005. Her parents moved her to Templin just north of Berlin in East Germany. Her father is Protestant pastor who was a Christian Socialist who believed in the compatibility of Christianity and Marxism.

In 1973 Merkel receives ‘arbiter’ degree in Templin. She enters the University of Leipzig also called Karl Marx University, in the fall.

Merkel studied physics, in which she has a PhD from the University of Leipzig. She applied for a job at technical institute in the GDR but failed to get it after she refused to spy for the secret police.

In 1989 she became involved in the democratic movement and became a member of Democratic Awakening Party to end Communist rule and in the first post-unification election in1990 she was elected to the Bundestag. She served as minster for women and youth in Helmut Kohl’s third cabinet and in 1994 became minister for environment and reactor safety.

After the CDU/CSU coalition was defeated in 1998, she was elected secretary-general of the CDU, before being elected the party’s first ever female Leader in 2000. Following the 2005, federal election she was appointed Germany’s first female Chancellor at the head of a grand coalition consisting of her own CDU party, its Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU) and the Social Democratic Part of Germany (SPD).
Angela Merkel

German shipping magnate: Albert Ballin

Albert Ballin was born on August 15, 1857, the son of Jewish immigrants from Denmark. He was born poor, but through his keen intelligence and flair for business was able to work his way up the ladder and become chairman of the steamship company.

He had gotten onto the shipping business through his family. His father ran a modest shipping agency, Morris & Co., and his business was to ensure that emigrants got from Europe to America to start new lives for themselves.

Albert Ballin took over the business in 1875. In the course of expansion, Ballin joined forces with English Carr Line, which provided new ships to carry the ever-swelling numbers of emigrants that Ballin’s company handled.

Ambitious and erudite, Ballin went to England as a teenager to learn the shipping business from the bottom up. He returned to Germany in 1883, aged 26 and then served three years as general passenger agent in Hamburg for the Carr Line.

His competitive selling ability was so great that he cut deeply into the business of the Hamburg-based lines and in 1886, was lured away to head the passenger service of Germany’s oldest transatlantic steamship company, the Hamburg-Amerika Packetfahrt.

Always elegantly dressed and elegantly mannered, Ballin believed that Hamburg-Amerika ships should be equally elegant and mannered. He traveled frequently on his ships, moving among the passengers, asking their opinions, always keeping an eye opened for flaws and lapses in service, making notes that would be transformed onto memorandums when he returned to his office.

Rising to Director General of HAPAG after 1889, Ballin built that line into the world’s largest shipping company, and with it built the port of Hamburg into Germany’s second largest city. The HAPAG offered competitive prices and efficient service both in a passenger travel and freight and soon took over the lead that British steamship companies had monopolized for decades.

By 1913 there were 175 ships in the line with a combined tonnage of 12.3 million. Ballin brought about the American-German shipping agreement of 1912 and became the Kaiser’s consultant on economic affairs.

Ballin committed suicide in Hamburg in 1918 two days before the end of World War I.
German shipping magnate: Albert Ballin 

Otto von Bismarck (1 April 1815 – 30 July 1898)

Otto von Bismarck unified Germany under a conservative government and altered the balance of power in nineteenth century Europe. He founded the German Empire in 1871 and served as its chancellor for 19 years.

Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck was born in Schönhausen to the Junker family of Prussia in 1815, the year peace was restored to Europe after the tumultuous Napoleonic Wars.

He was the fourth of six children – four sons and two daughters - of whom the eldest was born in 1807 and the youngest in 1827.

In his youth he preferred drinking and duels to his law studies in Berlin and his later duties as a civil servant.

Otto von Bismarck in 1874

In 1847, desirous of more excitement and power than he could find in the country, he reentered public life. Four years later he began to build a base of diplomatic experience as the Prussian delegate to the Parliament of the Germanic Confederation.

In 1849, the Prussian king arrested the Frankfurt Assembly, Bismarck expressed his approval. His support of the Prussian monarchy won him a post in the government and in 1862 he was appointed chancellor.

When he took office, Prussia was widely considered the weakest of the five European powers, but under his leadership Prussian won a war against Denmark in 1864, the even Weeks’ War in 1866, and the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71).

Through these wars he achieved his goal of political unification of a Prussian-dominated Germane Empire.

He was not a political gambler but a moderate who waged war only when all other diplomatic alternatives had been exhausted and when he was reasonably sure that all the military diplomatic advantages were on his side.

In 1890 William II dismissed Bismarck. In 1898 the frustrated ‘Iron Chancellor’ died.
Otto von Bismarck (1 April 1815 – 30 July 1898)