Emil Kraepelin and the problem of degeneration

Abstract

When Kraepelin laid the foundations of what we now understand as psychiatry, he was faithful to the nineteenth-century hygienist's penchant for approaching social problems in terms of medical categories. With Kraepelin's writings on the issue of degeneration as a backdrop, the article analyzes how the methodology he introduced for researching psychiatric illnesses is indebted to Morel's theory of degeneration. The article explores not only Kraepelin's concern with defining a classification of mental pathologies just as well grounded as the classifications of biological pathologies, but also his use of comparative statistics and his explanations of morbid heredity.