Grisinger, Wilhelm

Birth, Early Years

Grisinger was the son of Gottfried Ferdinand Griesinger and his wife Karoline Luise, who studied with tutors before he entered the gymnasium, so he was not an ordinary student. In 1834, he entered the medical faculty of the University of Tübingen.

Prosperity, Mature Years

After graduating from the Faculty of Medicine in 1838 in Tübingen , Wilhelm Grisinger later studied in Paris with F. Mazhandi , and since 1839 he worked in the psychiatric hospital Friedrichshafen . Then, for two years, he was an assistant with E.A. von Zeller, director of the Vinental mental hospital, opened in 1834 in Württemberg . In 1847, Grisinger became professor of general pathology and the history of medicine in Kiel , and since 1854 - professor of the combined department of internal medicine and psychiatry , neuropathology at the universities of Zurich and Tübingen, from 1864 until his death he headed the department of psychiatry at the University of Friedrich Wilhelm .

Grisinger, after two years of service in a mental institution, in 1845, wrote a manual on mental illness, Die Pathologie und Therapie der psychischen Krankheiten. It attracted the general attention of the medical world and was soon translated into several foreign languages, including Russian.

Grisinger introduced a rational and psychological point of view into psychiatry, and his textbook has been a handbook of psychiatrists in various European countries for several decades. In addition, he published in special journals various small articles on neuropathology and psychiatry, as well as a large essay on infectious diseases.

For two years (1849-1851) he was a life doctor of the Egyptian Khedive and the head of the sanitary unit in Egypt . From 1854 to 1865, Grisinger occupied the Department of Internal Medicine in Tübingen and Zurich, and from 1865 became a professor of psychiatry in Berlin.

End of life, death

Although already three years later he died as a result of acute intestinal suffering, but for such a short time he did extremely much to develop the teaching of nervous and mental illness in Germany.

Psychiatric concept. Participation in the “struggle of the psyche and somatics”

The activities of V. Grisinger began during the discussion between the schools of the psyche and somatics . The former claimed that the main causes in the etiology of mental illness are idealistic reasons, namely, psychological , moral and theological disorders, that is, psychosis is a consequence of passions and vices ^[4] . Their opponents, somatics, argued that the cause of mental illness is exclusively materialistic ^[5] . However, among this progressive branch in 1830-1840 the idea of K.V. M. Jacobi dominated that the cause of psychosis is a disease of the whole organism, and the role of the brain was not paramount ^[5] . Wilhelm Grisinger in 1845 sharply criticized Jacobi's ideas, not denying the achievements of the somatic school, but giving the key role to the brain ^[5] .

Grisinger's worldview regarding psychiatry and neurology, as set out in Pathology and Therapy of Mental Illness:

1. The basis of psychosis is a pathological process.
2. The substrate of this pathological process is exclusively the brain : thus, Wilhelm Grisinger is a representative of the brain theory of psychoses and one of the founders of the neurological course of psychiatry .
3. Mental processes are built according to the reflex scheme (see # Concept of reflex ).
4. Separate psychotic pictures are not special diseases, but only symptoms of the process occurring in the brain, and each of them is a stage of this process (here V. Grisinger acted as one of the founders of clinical psychiatry).

Grisinger and Psychiatry

Grisinger was the first to raise the question of the history of the development of the soul and mental personality, going beyond the biological concept of the development of the organism. Grisinger believed that the most important causes of "craziness" are mental causes. He achieved a certain balance between pathological and psychopathological directions, and therefore the Swiss psychiatrist-existentialist L. Binswanger calls Grisinger the creator of the foundations of modern psychiatry.

Wilhelm Grisinger was a supporter of the merger into a single neuropathology and psychiatry - the idea for that time was very progressive, since neurology was part of internal medicine, and psychiatry was studied only in psycho-hospitals. In 1845, Grisinegra's work, Pathology and Therapy of Mental Illness, was published, which constituted an era in psychiatry and translated into almost all European languages. Wilhelm Grisinger argued that almost all psychoses are preceded by nonspecific emotional disorders in an expansive or depressive form. In the works of Grisinger (1845) there is a systematics and clinic of psychiatric diseases, as well as many psychopathological observations and general provisions that have been fruitful in the further development of the psychopathology of schizophrenia. This also includes a description of the so-called main mood, a person’s reaction to the changes that occur in her and the decay of the self, the interpretation of depersonalization syndrome, the division of hallucinations into primary ones and those resulting from affect, a typology of crazy ideas, a description of the phenomena of alienation of one’s own psychic production or activity, a description of the “done” thoughts and the “taking away” of thoughts.

Grisinger, giving an example of a complex hallucination that a healthy person has, in which all feelings act in such a coordinated manner that the general impression is that it is reality itself, says that the data by which we could accurately distinguish reality from imaginary are extremely shaky.

Professor Grisinger argued that hallucinations are “an act of sensation, not a performance”, and if these deceptions of feelings “want to win by speculation”, they get answers like what the French doctor Leray received from one patient: “I hear voices because “I hear them.” How they arise, I do not know, but for me they are as distinct as your voice. If I must believe in the reality of your speeches, then you must allow me to believe in the reality of those speeches, since they both feel the same. ”

The concept of reflex

Grisinger expressed his natural scientific understanding of psychopathological problems in that he attached great importance to one concept. It was created by physiology to denote the basic fact of animal life, this is a reflex. In the near future he found like-minded people. In 1845, Laycock spoke in England, who in his report to the British Medical Association proposed to extend the doctrine of reflexes to all functions of the brain.

Grisinger classification

I. State of mental depression. Her subspecies:

1. Hypochondria .
2. Simple melancholy in the narrow sense.
3. Melancholy with numbness .

II. The state of mental arousal is mania. Her subspecies:

1. Fury.
2. Insanity with expansive affects and revaluation of self .

III. The state of mental weakness. Her subspecies:

1. Partial delusional state.
2. General confusion.
3. Idiocy and cretinism.

IV. Complication of insanity:

1. General paralysis .
2. Epilepsy

• Yu. V. Cannabih. Chapter twenty two. Grisinger and his activities // History of Psychiatry . - Leningrad : State Medical Publishing House, 1928 . ;

• [one]
• [2]