Aktuelles aus der Geschichte der ärztlichen Standes / [Max Neuburger].

  • Max Neuburger
Date:
1919
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: Aktuelles aus der Geschichte der ärztlichen Standes / [Max Neuburger]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    from the chaos of mystical fancies which led them to regard mental diseases as the consequences of sin, or as the punishment of God, or, at all events, as purely psychical defects. The causes of mental aberration were at last sought for in corporeal lesions. This reform in Germany belongs pre-eminently to Langermann about the beginning of the nineteenth Century. The revolution in opinions upon this subject was even then so marked, the acknowledgement of the cura- bility and incurability of insanity was then so widespread, that he was at once enabled practically and energetically to insist on the erection of special institutions for the eure of insanity, and on their complete Separation from establishments devoted to incurables. Jacobi asserted that patients must be divided into certain chief classes, according to the degree of influence which their disease has over their moral and social behaviour, and according to the degree of their ability or inability to conduct themselves in a quiet, clean, decent and orderly manner, to observe prescribed rules, and to employ themselves usefully as well as according to the different kinds of medical treatment indicated by this diversity. Jacobi visited the York “ Retreat ” where a humane psychical treatment was first introduced. He published Sammlungen für die Heilkunde der Gemüthskrankheiten, Elberfeld, 1822, Über die Anlegung und Einrichtung von Irren-Heilanstalten, etc., Berlin, 1834; and Nachrichten über einige Öffentliche Irrenanstalten in England (1838). Samuel Tuke, the grandson of the founder of the York “ Retreat ” for the insane, William Tuke, wrote a description of this Institution in 1843. Jacobi published a German translation of S. Tuke’s book. Samuel Tuke wrote “ Introductory observations ” in K. W. Jacobi’s work On the con- struction and management of hospitals for the insane . . . Transl. by John Hitching, London, 1844. Jacobi’s Heilanstalt Siegburg became the most famous lunatic asylum in Germany (1837). But in contrast with his collaborator Bird, he did not accept Conolly’s non-restraint System. The reformer of psychiatry in Germany, Wilhelm Griesinger, was one of the first to bring about the treatment of the insane without violence— following Conolly’s path—and he substituted colonies and boarding with families for the closed institutions.
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