Wilhelm Griesinger

Wilhelm Griesinger was a German neurologist and psychiatrist, born in Stuttgart in 1817, who died in Berlin in 1868. He studied under Johann Lukas Schönlein at the University of Zurich and under the physiologist François Magendie in Paris, and in 1845 he published the influential textbook Die Pathologie und Therapie der psychischen Krankheiten. In the early 1850s he travelled to Egypt as director of the medical school in Cairo and became personal physician to Abbas I, gaining experience of tropical diseases that led to his writings on the diseases of Egypt. He returned to Tübingen as professor of clinical medicine in 1854 and from 1865 directed the Charité university polyclinic in Berlin, where he founded a medical-psychological society and the journal Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten. He is remembered for reforming the treatment of the mentally ill and the asylum system, and for arguing that so-called mental illnesses are illnesses of the nerves and brain.