Carl Friedrich Flemming

Carl Friedrich Flemming was a German psychiatrist, born in Jüterbog on 27 December 1799 and dying in Wiesbaden on 27 January 1880. He was the father of the cell biologist Walther Flemming. After receiving his medical doctorate in Berlin he worked as an assistant at the Sonnenschein mental asylum near Pirna. From 1830 to 1854 he directed the newly built psychiatric hospital at Sachsenberg, and afterwards kept a private practice in Schwerin. In 1844 he introduced the term dysthymia mutabilis for a disorder that alternates between dysthymia atra, a black depression, and dysthymia candida, a low level mania. He belonged to the somatic school, which held that insanity is a symptom of biological disease located outside the brain, especially in the organs of the abdomen and chest. His writings include Die Menschenseele and Die Thierseele (both 1830), a history of the Sachsenberg institution (1833), Pathologie und Therapie der Psychosen (1859) and Ueber Geistesstörungen und Geisteskranke (1872).