Emil Kraepelin’s Inaugural Lecture in Dorpat: Contexts and Legacies

Abstract

In his inaugural lecture delivered at the University of Dorpat in 1886, the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin presented one of the most concise accounts of the state of psychiatric research in the late nineteenth century. In his lecture, Kraepelin criticized the patho-anatomic research of contemporary neuropsychiatrists and argued that psychiatric research needed to be augmented by a new emphasis on experimental psychology. This article explores the historical contexts that informed Kraepelin's research agenda in experimental psychology. It argues that Kraepelin's early experimental research in Dorpat served as a catalyst for his later clinical research in Heidelberg in the sense that it evoked recognition of the importance of disease course and prompted him to expand the breadth of available information about patients beyond what laboratory research could provide. Kraepelin's experimental research can therefore neither be dismissed entirely, nor posited as the wellspring of his nosology, but needs instead to be viewed as a crucial tool of accurate diagnostic practice.

Diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease in Kraepelin’s clinic, 1909–1912

“…This marked a change from the first seven editions of his textbook Psychiatrie. Ein Lehrbuch für Studierende und Ärzte , published between 1887 and 1904, in which Kraepelin was sceptical about the practical value of basing psychiatric nosology on post-mortem pathological anatomy (see Engstrom and Kendler, 2015; Engstrom, 2016).…”