Griesinger, Wilhelm

   (pronounced [GREE-sing-er])

   (1817–1868)

   Considered the virtual founder of the first wave of biological psychiatry because of his views on the organicity of mental illness, Griesinger was born in Stuttgart. He graduated in 1838 in medicine at Tübingen with a particular interest in infectious diseases and served between 1840 and 1842 as an assistant of Ernst Albert Zeller (1804–1877) at the Winnenthal asylum. On the basis of this experience, he wrote an article in 1843 on "psychic reflex actions" (in the Archiv für physiologische Heilkunde), which might be considered important as setting the stage for looking at the brain physiologically rather than spatially (neurology gets the spatial perspectives). Then in 1845 at the age of 28, he published a psychiatry textbook, Mental Pathology and Therapeutics (Die Pathologie und Therapie der psychischen Krankheiten), a manual that expressed Griesinger’s organicist view: "All mental illness [alles Irresein] is based on brain disease," he said (p. 7).

   Yet, the manual enjoyed no particular reknown. Returning to Tübingen, he completed his Habilitation at the medical clinic in 1847, with the right to lecture in general pathology. At this point, Griesinger began a long series of wanderings: 1849 to Kiel as Ordinary professor and director of the outpatient clinic, then 1850 to Cairo as director of the Egyptian medical services, then 2 years later back to Germany again where in 1854 he became director of the medical clinic in Tübingen. In 1860, he was called to Zurich, where he became director of the cantonal hospital and, in addition, took over the headship of the city asylum, beginning in 1863 a series of lectures in psychiatry. In 1861, he published a second and greatly revised edition of his earlier textbook; this much more influential edition had a role in shifting psychiatry onto a more biological basis. Griesinger’s migrations came to an end in 1865 as he moved to Berlin as Ordinary professor, director of the university’s medical clinic in the Charité hospital (which he gave up in 1867), and simultaneously director of the psychiatric clinic, where his heart now lay. Together with Ludwig Meyer (1827–1900), professor of psychiatry in Göttingen, and Carl Friedrich Otto Westphal (1833–1890), at the time an assistant in the psychiatric clinic of the Charité, in 1867 he founded an important new psychiatric journal, the Archive of Psychiatry and Nervous Diseases (Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten), the first issue of which appeared in October of that year (although "1868–70" is printed on the title page of the first volume). In October 1868, Griesinger died of appendicitis at age 51.

   The intellectual achievements for which Griesinger is remembered were mainly crowded into the brief period at the end of his life: First, he wanted to break with the tradition of German "Romantic" psychiatry, exemplified by his predecessor at Berlin, Carl Wilhelm Ideler, and to make a scientific, clinically oriented psychiatry the intellectual equal of the other medical specialties, indeed to revive the teaching of psychiatry to medical students in a downtown urban clinic rather than in outlying rural asylums. Another achievement was the second edition of his textbook, The Pathology and Treatment of Mental Illnesses, in 1861, expanding as it did the concept that the brain was the seat of mental illness. Finally, Griesinger’s new journal, the Archive, in the hands of Meyer and Westphal quickly became the leading research journal in psychiatry internationally; it was explicitly dedicated to work on the underlying neurological nature of psychiatric illness. In retrospect, Griesinger figures as the founder of the first "biological psychiatry" (the second surfacing in our own time).