The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Kraepelin, Emil

Born Feb. 15, 1856, in Neustrelitz, Mecklenburg; died Oct. 7, 1926, in Munich. German psychiatrist. Professor of psychiatry at the universities of Dorpat (now Tartu; from 1886), Heidelberg (from 1891), and Munich (from 1903).

In 1922, Kraepelin left his professorship, to work at the Munich Research Institute for Psychiatry, which he had founded in 1917. His principal works were devoted to elaborating the clinical practice of mental diseases and their classification, which was constructed by Kraepelin according to the nosological principle. He believed that single causes entailed single consequences, that is, symptoms; Kraepelin attributed great significance to their course and outcome in delimiting nosological forms. One of Kraepelin’s major achievements was the division of endogenic psychoses according to their outcome into two categories: dementia praecox (schizophrenia) and manic-depressive psychosis.

His idealistic approach to the causes of mental disease led Kraepelin to assign too much significance to heredity and constitutional factors; he understood cause and effect as something permanent and immutable and did not take into account such factors as the body’s reactive features and the effect of the environment. Nevertheless, Kraepelin’s nosology remains the basis of clinical psychiatry. He created an important psychiatric school. Kraepelin’s Textbook of Psychiatry, upon which many generations of psychiatrists were reared, went through eight editions (from 1883).

WORKS

Uchebnik psikhiatrii, vols. [l]-2. Moscow, 1910–12.
Vvedenie v psikhiatricheskuiu kliniku, 4th ed. Moscow-Petrograd, 1923. REFERENCE Kannabikh, lu. Istoriia psikhiatrii. [Moscow], 1929.

E. IA. SHTERNBERG

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