Claude, Henri-Charles-Jules

   (1869–1945)

   Professor of mental diseases at the University of Paris from 1922 to his retirement in 1939, Claude was born in Paris, concentrated in internal medicine and neurology (much influenced by Jean-Martin Charcot), and by 1903 had acquired the rank of ward chief (médecin des hôpitaux). The following year, he passed the Agrégation exam and became the assistant of Fulgence Raymond (1844–1910), who had the chair of nervous diseases at the Salpêtrière hospice (the former Charcot chair). Here, Claude encouraged Raymond to organize an outpatient service for nonpsychotic illnesses ("les petits mentaux," as they were familiarily known). In 1922, Claude was appointed professor of mental diseases in the chair situated at Ste.-Anne mental hospital (in the French system, these chairs are located at certain hospitals), where he remained until his retirement in 1939. At Ste.-Anne, he sought immediately to make the teaching of psychiatry more interesting for medical students, giving them the feeling that psychiatry was a part of medicine rather than, as Jean Delay put it in his obituary of Claude, "appearing to them as an inaccessible domaine of purely speculative interest and walled off by a hermetic vocabulary" (L’Encéphale, 1950, p. 389).

   Claude is known for having introduced such physical therapies as the malarial fever cure (see Neurosyphilis; Wagner von Jauregg, Julius), insulin coma, and metrazol convulsion (see Convulsive Therapy: Chemical) into France; he is also associated with a rather unsuccessful effort, called organo-dynamic thinking, to synthesize psychiatry with the basic anatomical–clinical method of doing research in medicine (a method that much influenced his student Henri Ey). Not uncongenial to Sigmund Freud’s doctrines, Claude had among his residents such prominent later figures in French psychoanalysis as Jacques Lacan, Raymond de Saussure (1894–1971), and Rudolph Loewenstein (1898–1976). Claude encouraged the formation in 1925 of the pro-psychoanalytic Groupe de l’Évolution psychiatrique. Pierre Pichot calls Ste.-Anne under Claude "one of the most lively centres of French psychiatry between the wars" (History of Psychiatry, p. 104).

   Despite Claude’s neurobiological orientation, much reinforced by the epidemic of encephalitis of 1917, he was a great benefactor of the psychoanalytic movement—as Pierre Morel points out in his biographical dictionary of French psychiatry. In 1923, Claude asked René Laforgue (1894–1962) to organize a psychoanalytic consultation service at Ste.-Anne, where the founders of the future Paris Psychoanalytic Society later met. Three years later, he started a lecture series on psychoanalysis in the psychiatric clinic of the hospital. A number of later psychoanalysts, such as Lacan, passed through Claude’s clinic as assistant physicians. Yet, in his memoirs, Henri Baruk (1897–1999) has left an unforgettable image of Claude as petty and vain and quite uncomfortable with clinical psychiatry (People Like Us [Des hommes comme nous], 1976, pp. 28–33).