Wilhelm Griesinger


Wilhelm Griesinger was a German neurologist and psychiatrist born in Stuttgart.

Life and career

He studied under Johann Lukas Schönlein at the University of Zurich and physiologist François Magendie in Paris. After receiving his doctorate, he worked in several locations, including Winnethal in Württemberg, in Stuttgart, in the medical clinic at Tübingen, and at the University of Kiel.
In the early 1850s he traveled to Egypt as director of the medical school in Cairo, and in the meantime became a personal physician to Abbas I. During his stay in Egypt, he gained experience in regards to tropical diseases, and as a result published Klinische und anatomische Beobachtungen über die Krankheiten von Aegypten and Infectionskrankheiten.
In 1854 he returned to the University of Tübingen as a professor of clinical medicine, succeeding his friend Carl Wunderlich as director of the Tübingen medical clinic. In 1859 Griesinger became head of an institution for mentally handicapped children in the small town of Mariaberg, and beginning in 1860, participated in the planning of the Burghölzli Mental Hospital in Zurich.
In 1865 he moved to Berlin, where he succeeded Moritz Heinrich Romberg as director at the university polyclinic. In Berlin he founded a medical-psychological society, the Berliner Medicinisch-psychologische Gesellschaft, and established an influential psychiatric journal, the Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten. In 1868, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He died in Berlin.
Griesinger is remembered for initiating reforms in treatment of the mentally ill as well as introducing changes to the existing "asylum system". He believed in integration of the mentally ill into society, and proposed that short-term hospitalization be combined with close cooperation of natural support systems. He also provided valuable insights on the nature of psychopathic behavior. In the preface for the first issue of the Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten, Griesinger wrote, "Psychiatry has undergone a transformation in its relation to the rest of medicine.... This transformation rests principally on the realization that patients with so-called 'mental illnesses' are really individuals with illnesses of the nerves and brain,..." Today, the Wilhelm Griesinger Hospital in Berlin is named in his honor.

Associated eponym