Richard von Krafft-Ebing

Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840 to 1902) was a German psychiatrist best remembered as the author of Psychopathia Sexualis, first published in 1886. Born into a noble family in Baden and trained in medicine at Heidelberg, where he qualified in 1863 with a thesis on sensory delusions, he worked at the Illenau asylum and in private practice in Baden-Baden before taking up academic posts. He opened a psychiatric clinic at Strasbourg in 1872 and from 1873 directed the Feldhof state asylum near Graz while holding the chair of psychiatry there. He wrote on the relationship between psychiatry and criminal law, including a textbook of forensic psychopathology, and produced a general textbook of psychiatry in 1879. His casebook on sexual behaviour went through many expanded editions and became widely known.