Emil Kraepelin Biography

Emil Kraepelin was a renowned German psychiatrist who made remarkable contributions to this field of medicine and is credited as the founder of psychopharmacology and psychiatric genetics. His theories on the origin of mental disorders refuted all previous theories which according to him were not clinical. With extensive research which he conducted on his patients, throughout his career, Emil arrived at numerous conclusions which he meticulously published in his textbook on psychiatry, which consisted of nine volumes. He pioneered the principles which laid the founding stone for modern day psychiatry. He was of the opinion that mental illness as any other ailment should be clinically observed and classified into different category based on the similarity of syndrome. He initiated many reforms in the then existing condition of asylums which considered all mental disorders as variations of single disease. It was Kraepelin who pioneered the concept of classification of mental illness into two categories, based upon the factors responsible for the disorder. Thus he categorized the various mental illnesses as exogenous and endogenous; exogenous being caused by external factors the latter was a result of biological or hereditary factors. His theories were quite popular during the twentieth century and Kraepelin’s contribution to psychiatry is held in high regard by physicians world-wide, till date