Karl Leonhard

Karl Leonhard (1904 to 1988) was a German psychiatrist, born at Edelsfeld in Bavaria, the sixth of eleven children of a Protestant minister. He finished his medical education in 1928 and worked at psychiatric hospitals in Erlangen, Gabersee and, from 1936, Frankfurt, where Karl Kleist had called him. With Kleist and Edda Neele he built a detailed classification of the endogenous psychoses, known as the Kleist-Leonhard classification, separating phasic psychoses, cycloid psychoses and the unsystematic and systematic schizophrenias. He was a professor at Frankfurt, Erfurt and from 1957 at the Charité in East Berlin, where he died. He interviewed more than two thousand psychotic patients, and during the Third Reich he stopped making diagnoses that would endanger patients under the T-4 euthanasia program.