History of schizophrenia

Written description of schizophrenia had been tracked back to Egypt during the years 200 BC.

Ancient Greek and Roman literature indicated that the general population had an awareness of schizophrenia. Greek physician blamed delusion and paranoia on an imbalance of bodily humors.

Following the early lead of the British, after 1801 it was the French who dominated the medical study of the mentally ill until mid-century, when the Germans began their nomination of this field.

In April 1908 Eugen Bleuler (1857-1939) published a paper suggested that the disorder be renamed schizophrenia to remove the emphasis on prognosis suggested by the term dementia praecox. Schizophrenia formerly named as ‘dementia praecox’ by Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926) referring to the Latin meaning ‘out of one’s mind’.

Kraepelin first mentioned dementia praecox in 1893 and summed it up as a subcategory of mental degenerative processes.

Bleuler had been using the term schizophrenia in lectures to his medical staff at the Burgholzli Hospital in Zurich, Switzerland, prior this time.

The word schizophrenia is derived from the Greek word for ‘split brain’. The new term carried with it a different grammatical structure that implicitly alluded to a difference in theoretical conceptualization.
History of schizophrenia 

History of schizophrenia

Written description of schizophrenia have been traced back to Egypt during the year 200 BC.

Ancient Greek and Roman literature indicated that the general population had an awareness of schizophrenia.

Hippocrates differentiated schizophrenia from physically caused disorders such as alcoholism, epilepsy and acute febrile reactions.

Early Egyptians theorized that the illness was caused by the gas in the ventricles of the brain. In medieval times, schizophrenia was believed to be caused by demonic possession.

The first comprehensive description of schizophrenia dates to the beginning of the 18th century.

Schizophrenia was defined as an early dementia in the 19th century. A french psychiatrist Benedict Augustine Morel, observed the ‘early deterioration of the mind’ in a patient and used the phrase demence precoce to describe what he observed.

The modern concept of schizophrenia was first formalized by the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin in 1896. He proposed that paranoid psychosis, hebephrenia and catatonia were forms of the same disease.

History of schizophrenia