Philippe Pinel

Philippe Pinel was a French physician, a precursor of psychiatry, who lived from 1745 to 1826. He was instrumental in developing a more humane approach to the custody and care of psychiatric patients, known today as moral therapy, and he worked to abolish the shackling of mental patients with chains and to humanise their treatment more generally. After the French Revolution he argued that the mentally ill, whom he called the alienated, could be understood and cured. He also made notable contributions to the classification of mental disorders and is described by some as the father of modern psychiatry, with great influence in Europe and the United States.