Anthropological psychiatry in Germany during the first half of the nineteenth century

pp. 1-36

in: Gerlof Verwey, Psychiatry in an anthropological and biomedical context, Berlin, Springer, 1985

Abstract

When, in 1844, H. Damerow, the moving force behind organised institutional psychiatry"³ in Germany, wrote in the introduction to the first issue of the Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie, of which he was the editor, about "the anthropological factor which is the hidden root of all the theories and systems on the tree of psychiatry",⁴ he was pointing to a philosophical presupposition which had, until then, determined nineteenth-century German psychiatry's conception of itself. It is precisely this (philosophical anthropological) presupposition which is meant when we refer to this psychiatric and medical literature as anthropological psychiatry or medicine.