Magnan, Jacques-Joseph Valentin

   (1835–1916)

   Born in the Mediterranean French city of Perpignan, Magnan studied medicine at Montpellier, then interned in Lyon. In 1863, he went to Paris for a further internship, where he was taught by psychiatrist Prosper-Jean-Aimé Lucas (1808–1885) at Bicêtre Hospital and by Jules-Gabriel-François Baillarger (1809–1890) and Jean-Pierre Falret at the Salpêtrière hospice. In 1867, he joined the admissions department of the newly founded Ste.-Anne mental hospital, where he remained until retiring in 1912 to a private nervous clinic that he also ran. It was his work on alcoholism that steered him toward the idea of degeneration, initially conceived by Lucas in 1850 and by Bénédict-Augustin Morel in 1857; from 1881 on, he worked on a classification of mental illnesses based on that concept. He introduced the notion of "chronic systematized delusional disorder" in 1886 (see PSYCHOSIS: EMERGENCE [1886])—in a book of that title, Le délire chronique à évolution systématique, that he and Paul Sérieux (1864–1947) wrote in 1892; the two authors contrasted the "insanity of the degenerate"—for example, la bouffée délirante (PSYCHOSIS: EMERGENCE [1886])—with "the chronic systematic delusional disorders" of the nondegenerate but mildly predisposed. Magnan added the adjective "systematic," or better "systematized" (meaning highly structured and logical) to show that there was nothing inchoate or disorganized about it.

   Psychiatrist Henri Baruk (1897–1999) (whose father Jacques Baruk [1872–1975] had interned with Magnan at Ste.-Anne) later wrote of Magnan: "[Magnan] systematized the ideas attributed to Morel, considerably inflating the concept of degeneration. Instead of limiting it, as Morel did, to a group of illnesses that were clearly hereditary, Magnan extended the concept to almost all of psychiatry." Magnan sought out physical signs of degeneration, such as the conformation of the ear. Baruk said there were really two kinds of doctors: careful clinical observers who gave to theory a subtleness that permitted them to adapt it to the complexities of nature, and system-builders, whose "rational desire to systematize everything and absolute mode of logic predominate without counterbalance and without brakes." Magnan, he said, belonged to the latter (Baruk, French Psychiatry from Pinel to Current Times [La psychiatrie française de Pinel à nos jours], 1967, p. 89). In retrospect, some observers feel that Magnan’s bouffée délirante and his "délire systématique" are indeed separate disorders and are worth distinguishing from Kraepelin’s schizophrenia.