Gustav Aschaffenburg

Gustav Aschaffenburg (23 May 1866 to 2 September 1944) was a German psychiatrist born in Zweibrücken. He took his medical doctorate at the University of Strasbourg in 1890 with a thesis on delirium tremens, then worked as an assistant to Emil Kraepelin at the psychiatric university clinic in Heidelberg, where he wrote at length on the Haltlose personality disorder. He later practised psychiatric medicine at the University of Halle and at the Akademie für praktische Medizin in Cologne, which became the University of Cologne in 1919. He is remembered as a pioneer of criminology and forensic psychiatry: his 1903 study Das Verbrechen und seine Bekämpfung examined individual hereditary and social environmental causes of crime and rejected Cesare Lombroso's idea of the born criminal, and it appeared in English in 1913 as Crime and Its Repression. In the 1930s the Nazi civil service law ended his academic career at Cologne, and he emigrated to the United States, where he worked as a professor at the Catholic University of America in Washington and at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.