Hermann Emminghaus

Hermann Emminghaus, born in Weimar in 1845 and died in 1904, was a German psychiatrist remembered as a pioneer of child and adolescent psychology and a founder of developmental psychopathology. He studied medicine at Göttingen and Jena and took his medical doctorate in 1869, worked as an assistant to Carl Gerhardt at the Jena medical clinic, and from 1874 to 1880 was at the University of Würzburg. In 1880 he was appointed to the first chair of psychiatry at the Imperial University of Dorpat, where Emil Kraepelin later took over his position, and from 1886 he was professor of psychiatry at Freiburg, where he introduced a new regimen of treatment for mental patients that included a no-restraint policy. His best known books are a general psychopathology text, Allgemeine Psychopathologie zur Einführung in das Studium der Geistesstörungen, and Die psychischen Störungen des Kindesalters, on childhood mental illness. Since 1984 a prize in his name has been awarded every two years for outstanding scientific work in child and adolescent psychiatry.