Caspar Max Brosius

Caspar Maximilian Brosius (1825 to 1910) was a German physician and psychiatrist born in Burgsteinfurt in Westphalia, the son of a parish doctor. He studied medicine at Greifswald and Bonn and received his doctorate in 1848, then practised in his home town before joining Adolph Albrecht Erlenmeyer in 1855 as an assistant at the asylum for brain and nervous disorders at Bendorf near Koblenz. In 1857 he founded a private psychiatric hospital on his own property at Bendorf, run on what he called the family system, in which patients were given living conditions as close as possible to those of healthy people outside institutions and were assessed and treated individually. The hospital grew considerably in later decades. He co-edited the journal Der Irrenfreund from 1859 and edited it alone from 1878, and in 1860 he published a German translation of John Conolly on treating the insane without mechanical restraint.