Morel, Bénédict-Augustin

   (1809–1873)

   Popularizer of the doctrine of degeneration in psychiatry and among the first to describe schizophrenia, Morel was born in Vienna during the French campaign against Austria. His father was a French military provisioner; nothing is known of his mother. After drifting about in adolescence, he arrived in Paris in 1831, attempted a career in journalism, and in 1839 began medical studies. He roomed with the young scientist Claude Bernard (1813–1878), and both were said to be so poor that they shared between them the only dress suit they had, the one wearing it while the other slept; it was Bernard who introduced Morel to his teacher, psychiatrist Jean-Pierre Falret. Thus, Morel began his own career of psychiatric research, publishing papers early on and involving himself in medical journalism. In 1856, Morel was appointed chief physician of the Saint-Yon asylum near Rouen in the Seine-Inférieure department, remaining thereafter. Morel was an enlightened asylum administrator, abolishing restraints, encouraging early discharge, and boarding patients out with local families. He is, however, best known for his Treatise on Degeneracy (Traité des dégénéréscences) published in 1857, which some observers view as the origin of psychiatric genetics (see PSYCHOSIS: EMERGENCE: mania . . . degeneration [1857]), and his Treatise on Mental Illness (Traité des maladies mentales) in 1860. (See SCHIZOPHRENIA: EMERGENCE: dementia praecox [1860].) In 1866, the fecund Morel published an article in the General Archives of Medicine (Archives générales de médecine) on "emotional delusions" (le délire émotif ) that represented the beginning of medical writing on anxiety disorders and phobias. (See ANXIETY: Morel’s délire émotif [1866].) Morel was operating under popular theories of the day that said acquired characteristics could be inherited. These theories were widely influential in psychiatry until the end of the 1920s, indeed in Russia to the 1950s, and were crucial in merging the physical and the psychological elements of the discipline of psychiatry.