The situation of German psychiatry in the early nineteenth century is of interest
as the specialty was developing in a society which was still largely non-
industrial. Examination of the literature of the time allows, therefore, a testing
of hypotheses concerning schizophrenia as a disease of industrial society.
This study presents a number of descriptions of illness resembling
schizophrenia derived from textbooks on mental illness and psychiatric journals
from the period 1790-1830, as well as a fictional account in a novella by Georg
Büchner dating from 1835. These descriptions suggest that schizophrenia did
occur not uncommonly in pre-industrial Germany, and that the most detailed
descriptions tended to come from non-specialist sources.
The implications of this for the non-recognition of schizophrenia before
Kraepelin's account of 1896 are discussed.
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Georg Büchner was born in 1813, the son of a doctor, and studied medicine at Strasbourg and Giessen, though his studies were cut short. The co-authorship of a revolutionary pamphlet The Hessian Messenger in 1834 landed him in trouble with a reactionary government and early the following year he was forced to flee Germany in order to avoid arrest. He found refuge first in Strasbourg, where he gained a doctorate in comparative anatomy, and then in Zurich, where he died, probably of typhoid, at the age of twenty-three.
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A typical example is The Deval's Elixir (Die Elixiere des Teufels, 1816) by E. T. A. Hoffmann, whose central character actively courts madness in order to enhance his experience.
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Ibid., 98.
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There is another near coincidence in timing between the publishing of Bleuler's study of schizophrenia in 1911 and the first ever staging of Büchner's Woyzeck m Munich in 1913. The main character in the play murders under the influence of paranoid delusions. It seems possible to postulate an interaction between psychiatry and a wider culture that facilitated recognition of the illness.
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