science · 30 March 1873 · 151 years ago
death
Died 30 Mar 1873 at age 63 (born 22 Nov 1809).
Austrian-born French psychologist who introduced the term dementia praecox to refer to a mental and emotional deterioration beginning at the time of puberty. The disorder was renamed schizophrenia in 1908 by the Swiss psychologist Eugen Bleuler. Morel developed a psychiatric theory of causality based on hereditary weakness. In his 700-page magnum opus, Traité des dégenerescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l'espèce humaine (1857), Morel developed a detailed method of discovering the great variety of "stigmata of degeneration " to be found among the mentally sick. These were mostly physical signs - various malformations - but also various intellectual and moral deviations from the normal.
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