Paralysestudien bei Negern und Indianern

Race, alcohol and general paralysis: Emil Kraepelin’s comparative psychiatry and his trips to Java (1904) and North America (1925)

“…Kraepelin’s ongoing interest in paralysis provided the justification for yet another research trip, this time to the USA, Mexico and Cuba in the spring of 1925 (Bendick, 1989: 172–179; Edition , VIII: 51–69; Engstrom, Burgmair and Weber, 2016; Plaut, 1926, 1927a). 19 Although there were other, and indeed more important, motivations for the trip, Kraepelin used it to continue his research in comparative psychiatry and in particular to study paralysis in African-American and native Indian patients.…”

“…Kraepelin and Plaut concluded that there existed no discernible difference between blacks and whites as far as their respective susceptibilities to paralysis were concerned. Furthermore, from this they deduced that racial and various other psychological and sexual differences had no part to play in the emergence of paralysis (Plaut, 1926: 44–6). But drawing similarly clear-cut conclusions about native Indians proved to be far more difficult.…”

“…Although such disheartening results might have been taken as confirmation of the notion that native Indians were less susceptible to paralysis, Kraepelin and Plaut drew rather different conclusions from their evidence. The fact that they believed they had found a few cases of paralysis implied that native Indians did not enjoy ‘true immunity from paralysis’ (Plaut, 1926: 73). More importantly for our argument, however, Kraepelin and Plaut seem to have concluded that institutionally derived statistics were so unreliable as to make any definitive statements about trends in the general population impossible.…”

“… 22. Emil Kraepelin to Ina Kraepelin, 5 May 1925, Perkow Papers (see previous note); also Plaut, 1926: 66. To the extent that Kraepelin shared notions like the ‘African Mind’ or any putative ‘consensus’ about specific ‘black pathologies’ that other observers attributed to African-Americans, he seems to have adopted views advanced by Green, 1914.…”

Emil Kraepelin’s ideas on transcultural psychiatry

“…The book of about 100 pages that he wrote during and about this research trip to the US is exclusively dedicated to syphilis and neurosyphilis, and Kraepelin contributed only a short preface. 19…”