Emil Kraepelin - Career

Career

Kraepelin began his medical studies at 18, in Leipzig and Würzburg, Germany. At Leipzig, he studied neuropathology under Paul Flechsig and experimental psychology with Wilhelm Wundt. Kraepelin would be a disciple of Wundt and had a lifelong interest in experimental psychology based on his theories. While there, Kraepelin wrote a prize-winning essay, "The Influence of Acute Illness in the Causation of Mental Disorders." He received his medical degree (M.D.) in 1878. In 1879, he went to work with Bernhard von Gudden at the University of Munich, where he completed his thesis, "The Place of Psychology in Psychiatry". Returning to the University of Leipzig in 1882, he worked in Wilhelm Heinrich Erb's neurology clinic and in Wundt's psychopharmacology laboratory.

Kraepelin's major work, "Compendium der Psychiatrie", was first published in 1883. In it, he argued that psychiatry was a branch of medical science and should be investigated by observation and experimentation like the other natural sciences. He called for research into the physical causes of mental illness, and started to establish the foundations of the modern classification system for mental disorders. Kraepelin proposed that by studying case histories and identifying specific disorders, the progression of mental illness could be predicted, after taking into account individual differences in personality and patient age at the onset of disease.

In 1884 he became senior physician in the Prussian provincial town of Leubus and the following year he was appointed director of the Treatment and Nursing Institute in Dresden. In 1886, at the age of 30, Kraepelin was named professor of psychiatry at the University of Dorpat (today the University of Tartu) in what is today Estonia (see Burgmair et al., Vol IV). Four years later, he became department head at the University of Heidelberg, where he remained until 1903. Whilst at Dorpat he became the director of the eighty-bed University Clinic. There he began to study and record many clinical histories in detail and "was led to consider the importance of the course of the illness with regard to the classification of mental disorders."

In 1903 Kraepelin moved to Munich to take up post as Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at the University of Munich.

He was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1908.

In 1912 at the request of the German Society of Psychiatry, he began plans to establish a centre for research. Following a large donation from the Jewish German American banker James Loeb who had at one time been a patient, and promises of support from 'patrons of science', the German Institute for Psychiatric Research was founded in 1917 in Munich. Initially housed in existing hospital buildings, it was maintained by further donations from Loeb and his relatives. In 1924 it came under the auspices of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of Science. The German American Rockefeller family's Rockefeller Foundation made a large donation enabling the development of a new dedicated building for the institute, along Kraepelin's guidelines, which was officially opened in 1928.

Kraepelin spoke out against the barbarous treatment that was prevalent in the psychiatric asylums of the time, and crusaded against alcohol, capital punishment and the imprisonment rather than treatment of the insane. He rejected psychoanalytical theories that posited innate or early sexuality as the cause of mental illness, and rejected philosophical speculation as unscientific. He focused on collecting clinical data, and was particularly interested in neuropathology (e.g. diseased tissue).

Kraepelin retired from teaching at the age of 66, spending his remaining years establishing the Institute. The final edition of his Textbook of Psychiatry was published in 1927, shortly after his death. It comprised four volumes and was ten times larger than the first edition of 1883.