Dementia Praecox and Paraphrenia.

Abstract

The German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin (1856 - 1926) is justly called father of modern psychiatry. He was the first to identify dementia praecox (schizophrenia) and manic-depression, and he pioneered the use of drugs to treat mental illness. He was also joint discoverer of Alzheimer's disease - which he named after his collaborator, Dr Alois Alzheimer. Kraepelin presented these and other discoveries in successive editions of his Psychiatrie: Ein Lehrbuch (definitive 8th edition also now available from Thoemmes Press). Much of this gigantic textbook can only be read in the original German; but parts of it were translated into English, and they had a very profound influence on the development of world psychiatry for the rest of the 20th century. Although Bleuler's name for the disease came to replace Kraepelin's term, Kraepelin's general description of the syndrome and division of it into subforms such as hebephrenia and catatonia has persisted. He succeeded in tying together into a single recognizable diagnostic category a disparate array of symptoms that, before Kraepelin, had not been seen as cohering. Despite myriad later refinements, Kraepelin's description of the syndrome is still the classic presentation; it very much lives on in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual used by present-day psychiatrists. Dementia Praecox and Paraphrenia (1919) was the book in which Kraepelin first presented his work on schizophrenia to the English-speaking world. It was probably the most influential psychiatric text of the entire 20th century, and has now become rare. Thoemmes Press is pleased to make this facsimile of the first edition available as a single volume.

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