Kahlbaum, Karl Ludwig

   (1828–1899)

   One of the originators of the concept of schizophrenia—next to Bénédict-Augustin Morel and Emil Kraepelin—and pioneer of nosology, Kahlbaum was born in a small Prussian town into the family of a coachman. Although he had a bent toward the natural sciences, practical considerations steered him to medicine, and he received his M.D. from Berlin University in 1854. In 1856, he joined the staff of the Allenberg asylum in East Prussia and distinguished himself by his careful observation of patients. In 1863, he received his Habilitation in psychiatry at the University of Königsberg in East Prussia. Three years later, in 1866, after the Prussian ministry had denied him a clinical professorship in psychiatry, he took a post at a private nervous clinic in Görlitz, and in 1867 he became owner of the clinic. Here, he founded a service for pediatric psychiatry (Pädagogium für jugendliche Nerven- und Gemüthskranke), where he and his assistant Ewald Hecker (1843–1909), whom he had brought with him from Allenberg, had opportunity to examine a number of young people with acute schizophrenia. (Kahlbaum was married to a cousin of Hecker’s.)

   Kahlbaum was among the first researchers to separate out different disease entities in psychiatry on the basis of course. (See Schizophrenia: Emergence [from 1863].) The model of neurosyphilis was the inspiration of this entire generation of investigators: find other diseases that also had constantly changing symptom pictures at any given moment, yet all of which ineluctably end in death and dementia (or end in some other way, but which have a common course). In 1863, he published his Habilitation, The Classification of Psychiatric Diseases (Die Gruppirung der psychischen Krankheiten), which identified "typical insanity" (Vesania typica) as degenerating progressively into dementia. In 1874 his book, Catatonia (die Katatonie: oder das Spannungsirresein), placed motor symptoms in psychosis on the map. And an article of his in 1882 in Der Irrenfreund (The Friend of the Insane) described cyclothymia. (See Manic-Depressive Illness.) In view of the enormous curriculum vitas that investigators compile today, it is worthy of note that Kahlbaum, whom Carl Wernicke (see Wernicke–Kleist–Leonhard Pathway) considered next only to Theodor Meynert, had a lifetime record of publication of only 16 books and articles.