Stroemgren, Erik

   (1909–1993)

   (See also Psychiatric Genetics.)

   Pioneer of psychiatric epidemiology and of lithium treatment, Strömgren was born in Copenhagen, his parents Swedes who had spent 6 years in Germany before moving to Denmark. His father was a professor of astronomy at the University of Copenhagen (also president of the Danish Academy of Sciences), his mother a distinguished dentist. After gaining his M.D. in Copenhagen in 1934, he interned first at Vordingbord psychiatric hospital near the island of Bornholm, then at the local general hospital on Bornholm island, an isolated area that he thought would be perfect for a genetic-epidemiological study. In the course of making more than a thousand home visits, he realized that the great majority of Bornholmers with psychiatric symptoms had never come into contact of any kind with psychiatry. Later Strömgren said, "The existence of this large number of undiagnosed and mostly untreated mentally disordered human beings seemed to me to constitute one of the most important problems of psychiatry" (Shepherd, Psychiatrists, p. 155).

   In 1935, Strömgren traveled to Germany for a 3-week visit to the German Psychiatric Research Institute (DFA) in Munich to study research basics with psychiatric geneticists Ernst Rüdin (1874–1952), Hans Luxenburger (1894–1976), Franz Kallmann (1897–1965) and Bruno Schulz (1901–1954). His Bornholm research eventuated in his 1938 doctoral thesis, Contributions to Psychiatric Genetics on the Basis of an Island Population (Beiträge zur psychiatrischen Erblehre, auf Grund von Untersuchungen an einer Inselbevölkerung), which carried out the first comprehensive population study using modern techniques, calculating prevalence rates and inquiring about family history; it is now recognized as a classic in psychiatric epidemiology.

   During the Second World War, Strömgren was an assistant of August Wimmer (see Psychosis: Emergence: psychogenic psychosis [1916]) at the university hospital in Copenhagen, then in 1942 became acting director of the big psychiatric hospital in Roskilde, moving on a year later to the Aarhus psychiatric hospital in Risskov, of which he became chief in 1945 and simultaneously professor of psychiatry at Aarhus University. At the psychiatric hospital, he set out to develop a research institute similar to the one in Munich. Central to this plan was moving to Aarhus a national register of psychiatric patients founded in Copenhagen in the late 1920s at the Institute of Human Genetics. Strömgren used this to monitor all current psychiatric admissions in Denmark. His Contributions to Psychiatric Epidemiology and Genetics (1968) summarized his ideas about "reactive psychoses" and "schizophreniform psychoses" as well as his findings on schizophrenia from twin studies. During the years, Strömgren also worked as a consultant for the World Health Organization in Geneva and in Copenhagen. Scientifically, Strömgren is known for his work on the psychogenic psychoses (see Psychosis: Emergence: psychogenic psychosis [1974]), for supporting Mogen Schou’s work on lithium treatment of manic-depressive illness, and above all for making the Danish National Case Register "a research instrument of extraordinary significance for population genetics," as Strömgren’s biographer Heinz Häfner put it (in Nervenärzte, edited by Hans Schliack). See also the obituary by Aksel Bertelsen and Irving Gottesman in Neurology, Psychiatry and Brain Research (1994).