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Abstract

The term psychiatry (Psychiatrie) was first used in 1800, in the early work of Leipzig Romantic natural philosopher and later neuroanatomist Karl Friedrich Burdach; it was a recherché reference to medical animism. This little-known instance of neologism by a young ambitious author invites a brief lexicological study of psychiatry as a specialty in search of its place among the medical specialties, methods and applications. The European historical lexicology of psychiatry recalls the philosophical commentary tradition on Aristotle’s De Anima, eventually (c. 1525) honoured with the mononym psychologia. The battle for the soul’s science was superseded by the increasingly diverse theoretical, empirical, forensic and literary-humanitarian interests in mental medicine during the second half of the eighteenth century.

Keywords

Animism etymology historical lexicology Karl Friedrich Burdach psychiatry (term)psychology (term)

Introduction

Psychiatry, from long before it eventually became known by the name, has been a specialty in search of its due place within medicine and within medical writing, and within a medico-philosophico-theological history. Trail-blazing European psychiatrists were variably drawn to locating their object of study – the disordered mind – in the history of medicine and of ideas. Pinel (1800) included references to les anciens throughout. Heinroth (1818: I, 64–108) presented a much more elaborate ‘critical history of the theory and technique [Technik] of mental disorders [Seelenstörungen], from the most ancient to the most recent’;¹ Johannes Baptista Friedreich later nominated this as the first exercise in its kind. If the reification of the specialty of ‘psychological medicine’ was still tentative, it was perhaps best illustrated by this early claim to an ancient prehistory.

The protracted search for a suitable, eventually neoclassical, name for ‘psychiatry’ may be recognized as equally indicative of the early nineteenth-century intersecting of soul-searching and specialty-establishing. Broad consensus has it that the etymology of the term ‘psychiatry’ should attribute it to Halle physiologist-physician Johann Christian Reil’s 1808 schematic juxtaposition of Chirurgie and Psychiaterie, in a booklet-length article dedicated to the identity of mental medicine (Reil, 1808) and in contemporary publications (e.g. Reil, 1807/8: 4; on Reil, see Richards, 1998).² Some psychiatrists celebrated psychiatry’s ‘200th birthday’ in 2008 (Marneros, 2008), and even entitled a book after the 1808 coinage (Marneros and Pillmann, 2005). Etymology of course makes for a tricky birth certificate for a field of knowledge; Reil had earlier used suggestive paraphrases (psychische Heilkunde, psychische Medicin), using the former in the title of a journal started in 1805 which was entirely dedicated to this subject. Historians celebrated a bicentennial in 2005, honouring the lecturing debut of Heinroth in Leipzig (Angermeyer and Steinberg, 2005). Marneros and Pillmann (2005) probed, in some detail, the historical context and corollaries of Reil’s unattributed coinage (Psychiaterie), including the term’s later contraction to Psychiatrie. What they did not find was that the orthographic gesture had already been published in a short review of Reil (1808) (Anon. 1808: 384). From 1825, the term Psychiatrik (rarely Psychiatrick, even Psychijatrie) was also used, as well as the slightly earlier Graeco-Latin cognate psychiatria and variant psychiatrice. A proper philological bench test came only in the fifth (1848) volume of the Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie und psychisch-gerichtliche Medicin, with a query by Dietrich Georg Kieser (1779–1862) and a rebuttal by an unidentified classicist (Kieser, 1848: 138); notably, Kieser later used three spelling variants. It has been proposed since the 1960s that Reil’s 1808 usage may have been inspired by the use of the term Jaterie (medicine; Jateria in the recommended neo-Latin) by Andreas Röschlaub (1804; see Marneros and Pillmann, 2005: 32). Röschlaub (1768–1835) was a lecturing physician at the University of Landshut. He used Jatrie as early as 1802, in fact (Röschlaub, 1802: 23, 265, 266) as well as in Volume 6, Part 2, of Röschlaub’s Magazin zur Vervollkommnung der Medizin, as a synonym alternatively for Therapie and Heilkunst. The term (‘Jatrie, oder Jatirie’) reappeared in the 1803 inaugural issue of Hygiea: Zeitschrift für öffentliche und private Gesundheitspflege, co-edited by Röschlaub (with Georg Oeggl). But whence did he get this unreferenced term?

It is rarely mentioned that both Jatrie and Psychiatrie are attested in a work by Karl Friedrich Burdach (1776–1847), a Leipzig Privatdocent, physiologist and principal protagonist of the romantische Naturphilosophie. This book was Propädeutik zum Studium der gesammten Heilkunst (Burdach, 1800), which was one of the young author’s earliest post-doctoral works. Burdach is mostly remembered for his later contributions to neuroanatomy, alongside Reil (Meyer, 1966, 1970; see also Feremutsch, 1953; Poggi, 1994). In his book (Burdach, 1800), Psychiatrie appears last in a string of terms including Fysiatrie, Chemiatrie, Jatromathematik, and Zooiatrie. It is apparent from Burdach’s line-up that the ‘psychic’ forces (geistige Kräften) complemented the well-established ones described by physics, chemistry, biometrics and concepts of animal vitality, and their appraisal within medicine was designated psychiatry. The work advanced quite a few coinages, observed Richards (2003: 16), who focuses rather on Burdach’s early use of Biologie. Burdach would coin a few more terms in later work. One was Zoopsychologie (‘animal psychology’; Burdach, 1810a: 357) where others had been using Thierseelenkunde. Of the terms cited by Burdach (1800), only Psychiatrie appears to be an entirely new one, denoting animism, or what Ernst Gottfried Kurella in 1750 had captured, with reference to Stahl, by the neologism Seelen-Pathologie (Kurella, 1750: preface, n. pag.). The line-up identifies familiar eighteenth-century physiological paradigms, distributed along lines of materialism, mechanism, organicism and animism-vitalism, which appear – sans neologisms – in Cabanis (1798/1799) among many others.

Iatromathematica alluded to the pervasive eighteenth-century debate about the merits of medicina mechanica, which looked at the human body in terms of biomechanics, including aero- and hemodynamics. Zoojatria had hitherto meant veterinarian medicine (that is, Thierarzneykunst); Burdach’s (1800) Zooiatrie meant medicine focused on natural or animal forces in Man. Iatrophysica appeared in the title of Baldi (1637) and afterwards (whence the cognate Jatrophysik), and the chemo-pharmacotherapeutic term chymiatria/chimiatria/iatrochymia/iatrochemia (Jatrochemie, ‘Chymische Medicin’, in German) was used at least as early as 1506, and as recently as by Schmid (1799: 59). Terms widely used for centuries had been jatrice/jatrica (medicine), jatromnema (medical practice), jatreon/jatreion/jatrejon (‘officina medica/chirurgica’, barber shop or alternatively study or library), bibliotheca iatrica/medica, iatrologia (medicine), iatrophilologia, hippiatria (equine medicine), pædojatreja (pediatrics), and so on; however, by 1800 nothing as yet was termed iatropsychologia or iatrologia psychologica.³ Perhaps the closest was the single attestation of psychojatria (Ferrara-Aulisio, 1723), a term reportedly paired with psycosophia (i.e. psychosophia?) in a posthumous biographic outline of manuscripts of Italian jurist Domenico d’Aulisio (1639–1717). This 1723 list contains a notable number of neologisms (adelotiatria, cteniatria, etc.); in any case, the terms do not seem to occur in d’Aulisio’s (1639–1717) Historiae de ortu et progressu medicinae, as excerpted by his nephew Nicolò (Ferrara-Aulisio, 1723). This evident manuscript remained unpublished, however.⁴ Beyond that, we have an anonymous wit contributing to the Irish magazine The Modern Monitor; Or, Flyn’s Speculations, joking about the ‘many invaluable medicines for the diseases of the mind’ he discovered or learned from the ancients, and signing his article with the self-titling neologism psychiatros (Anon., 1770: 75). This took liberties with a dictionary term for physician, jatros/jatrus.

A review of Burdach (1800) in the Leipziger Jahrbuch der neuesten Literatur (in the Arzneygelahrtheit – medical science – section) dutifully listed Burdach’s expanded line-up of terms (Anon. 1801: 36). Remarkably, this local review may be one of the very few acknowledgements of this ad hoc nomenclature. Another is a review of Burdach (1800) in Friedrich Ludwig Augustin’s Die Neuesten Entdeckungen und Erläuterungen aus der Arzneikunde, which also reproduced Psychiatrie in context (Augustin, 1804: 5). Röschlaub’s (1804) equally neologistic Propädeutik did not refer to Burdach, and nor did Reil’s quite comparable project (1808). Leupoldt (1826), who wrote a Propädeutik two decades later, probed the neoclassical etymology of Jaterie (‘jatromechanisch, chemiatrisch, Psychiatrie, and similar contractions’; p. 4); however, he suggested no attributions for the last term, despite citing Burdach (1800) in his bibliography (p. 152) and mentioning Burdach in the preface (p. vi). After 1808, a few users of the term Psychiatrie explicitly credited Reil with it, but all failed to cite Burdach. A notable example was a 41-page Parisian medical dissertation (by an author from Cologne) entitled De Psychiateria, sive de methodo psychologice curandi (Elkendorf, 1813: 12). The term had not been accepted, at least in Paris. A review of this dissertation in the Journal de médecine, de chirurgie, pharmacie, etc. of December 1813 declared the eponymous term unclear, and thought its sense was better expressed using two words, médicine morale (Anon., 1813). Today’s sense of Psychiater (psychiatrist) seemingly only came in with an anonymous book review in the Neue Leipziger Literaturzeitung (Anon., 1809a: 1331). A second attestation of Psychiater is found in the Medicinisch-chirurgische Zeitung (Salzburg) of June 25, 1810 (Anon., 1810a: 404) and, in another book review, Lincolnshire physician-clergyman Francis Willis (1718–1807) is called one. Illustrative of the term’s initially poor performance, in 1817 Kieser, who was then an ophthalmologist-balneologist and would (30 years later) be director of a mental hospital, identified Psychiateria as ‘Pathologie und Therapie des Gehirns’ (Kieser, 1817: 546). Two years later, Kieser (1819: 499, 504, 683) proposed Iamatologia psychica (versus organica, mechanica, diaetetica, pharmaceutica), apart from, en passant, crediting Reil with the term Psychiateria.

Reil and Burdach dealt with problems that had been widely confronted throughout the preceding century. The notion of a mind-medicine distinct from body-medicine, and meriting its own name, inevitably echoed centuries of deliberation of the direction of influences between mind and body, specifically adverse influences. Reil (1808, 1816) distinguished three spheres of ‘receptivity’ (‘psychische, physikalisch-chemische und mechanische Receptivität’; 1808: 168, 169) and, like Burdach (1800), Reil (1816: 4, 26–7, 170–1) considered them to be separate yet strongly related, a concern, however, never entirely divorced from his reification of Psychiaterie/Psychiatrie (pp. 4, 26–7, 170–1). This begs the question whether Burdach possibly anticipated Reil’s outlining of a new medical subspeciality, such as initially seemed to merit reconsidering an established use of German predicates: ‘Es giebt also keine psychische Medicin, sondern eine Psychiaterie; eine Chirurgie, aber keine chirurgische Medicin’ (Reil, 1808: 169). Burdach indeed offered similar considerations. Below I very briefly historicize and outline Burdach’s forgotten early nomenclature and project, particularly as it helps to contextualize Reil’s famed re-coining of the epochal term ‘psychiatry’, some eight years later. For this, a brief onomasiology of preceding terminology is in order.

Avant la lettre: naming mental medicine before 1800/1808

Circa 1800 the nominal reification of a medicine of the soul was hardly ground-breaking, as the idea had been receiving increasingly substantive deliberation for half a century at least. Scores of paraphrases existed. Occasional eighteenth-century juxtapositions such as that of Leibarzneykunst and Seelenarzneykunst typically invoked an ancient distinction between medicine and philosophy as the ‘Medicine of the Passions’ and mind, respectively (Heilkunst der Seele and Arzney für die Seele, in German): ‘Est profecto animi medicina, philosophia’ (Cicero, Tusculan Disputations III.6). Since antiquity, various paraphrases were commonly used as mottos of philosophy or learning; hence the well-known inscription over the door of the Library of Alexandria according to Hecataeus of Abdera, ψυχῆς ἰατρείον (psychés iatreíon, healing place of the soul). In an article by Johann Wilhelm Heinrich Ziegenbein on English writer Edward Gibbon (1737–94), we find the contraction, Psychiatrion (sporadically spelt Psychiatreion) for ‘library’ ([Ziegenbein], 1794: 637). Robert Burton explained:

Cardan [physician-polymath Gerolamo Cardano, 1501–76] calls a Library the physicke of the soule, Divine authors fortifie the minde, make men bold & constant, and (as Hyperius addes) godly conference will not permitte the minde to be tortured with absurd cogitations. (Burton, 1621: 354, original italics)

Soul-curing philosophy was sometimes credited to the Egyptians (for example, ‘And for medicine of the minde [remede des ames], they haue proposed the exercise of Phylosophy, which can make lawes; and search out the nature of thinges’; Le Roy, 1579: 33-r; 1594: 37). Consider, moreover, frequent idiomatic and metaphoric allusions, in various ancient and early modern texts, to ‘mental medicine’ (ἰατρεία της ψυχής; ψυχών θεραπεία; medicina animæ/animorum; medicina mentis; medicina animorum morbis; afflictis medicina animis), in implicit or explicit contradistinction to the medicine of the body and of bodily passions (Ιατρεία παθών, σωμάτων θεραπεία; medicina corporum).

Second, suggestive terms such as Seelenarzt/Seelarzt (médecin des ames, in French) had been in common use for centuries as an epithet for Christ or God, and as a paraphrase of Seelsorger (pastor, consoler of souls). Christus medicus was in a more general sense archiater (princeps medicorum: physician-in-chief, supreme doctor) and pharmacist (Steiger, 2005). An elaborate medieval through Reformation medical metaphorics rendered God’s word, and by extension all religious consolation and teaching, geistliche/himmlische Arzney/Ertzney, or Seelen Ertzney in early modern German (e.g. Rhegius, 1529). The title of one work was: Ein Geistliche bewerte Artzney, aus der Himmlischen Apotecken des Göttlichen Worts genommen (Vischer, 1577). A contemporary work explained: ‘Geistliche Artzet brauchen Geistliche Arzney. Also redt dieser Geistlich Arzet von Geistlicher Kranckheit’ (Hoffmeister, 1575: clxxxii-r): the ‘curation’ through conversion and penance of the mind troubled by evil (temptation, the will to sin or idolatry), by fear of death, by the ‘melancholic devil’ (Melancholischen Teufel), and by the ‘poison of heresy’ (Gifft der Ketzerey). ‘Anime [i.e. animae] medicina est Christus herba salutis’, according to the Archbishop of Santiago de Compostela (Bérenger, 1477). ‘Anime medicina est gratia spiritussancti’, concurred scholastic theologian and philosopher Bonaventure (1495): the animae medicus is Christ and, where philosophers have only obscured them, mental disorders (anim[a]e morbi) can only be cured by the Lord. Nominating the Lord’s archiatry/psychiatry entailed reclaiming it from the philosophers: while Galen was the doctor of bodies, Christ, not Plato (as some had argued: Ficino, 1489: n. pag.), was the true medicus animorum. There was, then, a straightforward early modern religious nosology of ‘diseases of the soul’ (‘spirituall Sicknesses’) deserving of a distinct ‘medicine’ (‘physicke for the soule’, ‘medicine of the minde’) in two offices: an internal one (God/Christ) and an external one, perhaps held earlier by the Philosophers but currently by the Theologians (Abernethy, 1622 [1615]: 1–2). Wondrous paraphrases include geistliche Wundartzney (‘mental surgery’; Neser, 1573) or Chirurgia spiritualis. Hence, in the 1647 revision of Melchior Weinrich’s Ærarium poeticum (1647 [1618]) by German theologian Joseph Clauder (1586–1653), neo-Latin psychiater was an epithet for vicarius Christi, vicar of Christ, or (ordained) servant of God’s word, commonly referring to either priesthood or the Pope (Weinrich, 1647: 76). The term may have first appeared in that denotation in a preface to the instructions of the diocesan synod of Osnabruck (Decreta Synodi Diocesanæ Osnabrugensis) held in 1625, and published in 1628 (Synodvs Maior Osnabvrgensis [1628]: 10). In this light, we may understand the title of a work dated 1672: Psychiater conscientiosus, das ist, Einfältige Entwerffung, wie ein jedweder, so sich nach Gottes Willen ins Predigt-Amt begeben will, dasselbe soll rechtmäßig antreten, und gebührlich darinnen leben über 1 Tim II 1.⁵

Terms used by authors started to express more concretely medical-therapeutic ambitions around the mid-eighteenth century (Knote, 2015). The question posed here was, how did Christian Wolff’s Psychologia empirica, published in 1732, pertain to medical knowledge and practice? Indeed, when did medical men start to use the titular term? Neo-Latin psychologia denoting the philosophical-theological animae scientia is attested at least as early as 1525 (Janssen and Hubbard, 2021: 184), while by the 1680s, English psychologie/psychology/psucologie denoted alternatively a metadiscipline, or a subdiscipline, of (medical) anthropology (for context and details, see Ross, 2017). The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) speaks of a newer denotation that shifts from ‘soul or spirit’ to ‘the human mind’, citing a 1712 source for the latter, though admitting ‘it is difficult to determine when it began to be used in sense 2’.⁶ English psychologie was perhaps first used in a medical context in a translation by Nicholas Culpeper of Šimon Partlic’s 1625 Medici systematis harmonici (Partlicius 1654: 167, 168, 174). An unacknowledged but likely source for this denotation, still well-known two centuries later, was Caspar Bartholin the Elder’s Anatomicæ institutiones corporis humani, the preface of which had similarly subdivided anthropologia (antropologia in later editions) into ψυχολογία and anatomia (Bartholin, 1611: 1). This singular use of psychology made it into two of four mid-century translations, including Culpeper’s (Bartholin and Bartholin, 1663: introduction, n. pag.)⁷ and shows up, unacknowledged, in other 1650s works on ‘anthropology’, one of these defining the term as ‘the nature of the Rationall Soule discoursed’ (Anonymous, 1655: 1). A kindred word pair, attested in English from 1680, is pneumatology and somatology (the former ‘gives an account of his [Man’s] Soul’: H[aworth], 1680: 12). These sixteenth-century neologisms and their pairings had hitherto been the concern of natural philosophers, rarely if ever ‘physitians’ such as Samuel Haworth (b. 1659/60).

During the early eighteenth century, various authors started using the more territorializing phrase psychologia medica, although therapeutic applications were not always clear. Antoine Le Camus’s popular two-volume Médecine de l’esprit (1753/1798) was explicitly heralded in a German review (in advance of the much-delayed translation) as a contribution not to Sittenlehre (ethics, moral philosophy) but to medical intervention (in Maschenbauer, 1754: esp. 342–9). Kratzenstein (1745: 29–31) had already discussed electricity in relation to the Cur der Seele; he was part of an extended scene of psychomedicine in Halle (Zelle, 2001). In his 1746 inaugural dissertation on melancholy, published in Halle, Johann Ludwig Rüdiger (1724–60) dedicated a section to comparing the weight of two fields of study; here he stated ‘without vanity’ that ‘philosophical psychology has made not nearly as much progress as medical psychology’ (Rüdiger, 1746: 17). Gaub’s De regimine mentis (1747) comparably and explicitly queried the ‘duty’ involved in medical men’s regard for the mind; this book was also published in expanded editions in 1767 and 1776, and was widely translated. In Bolten (1751) one gets a formal call to mental-medical science, unlocking a philosophische Pathologie such as would oversee the realm of psychologische Curen and the Therapie für alle Seelenkranckheiten (‘Art, Seelenkranckheiten zu heben . . . der Art die Seele zu curiren’; p. 25). An anonymous piece on interconnections of mental disorders (‘Vom Zusammenhange der Krankheiten der Seele’), attributed to the editor of Der Arzt, Johann August Unzer (1757), invoked the terms Seelenarzt, Seelenlehre, Seelenkenner and Seelencur, in an effort to envision something the author calls Lehre von den psychologischen Curen (study of psychological therapies) and Lehre von den Seelenkrankheiten (study of mental disorders). The text was considered worth reprinting, still anonymously, in the Neues hamburgisches Magazin (Anon., 1775). A meticulously schematic 1759 medical dissertation by Gottlieb Friedrich Engel from Stuttgart advanced the case for a pathologia & therapia psychologica, and ventured a working distinction between pathologia somatologica, psychologica and somato-psychologica (Engel, 1759: 12). The unelaborated, italicized term Therapia psychologica also appeared in Boerhaave’s Principia diaetetica (1781: 82), which was the edition revised, enlarged and annotated by Heinrich Friedrich von Delius; the first edition of 1777 had not included it.

The programmatic German terms Seelenheilkunde, Seelenkrankheitskunde, Seelenzeichenkunde and Seelendiätätik all appeared as sections of the 1783 inaugural issue, and subsequent issues, of Karl Philip Moriz’s call to ‘know thyself’: Gnōthi sauton: oder, Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde als ein Lesebuch für Gelehrte und Ungelehrte. Moritz’s announcement of the journal (dated 14 January 1782, and published in two Berlin periodicals) had already dropped the neologism Seelenkrankheitslehre as well as the following, open-ended prospectus of neologistic sub-specialties: ‘Seelenphysiologie, Seelenpathologie, Seelensemiotik, Seelendiätetik, u.s.w.’ (Moritz, 1782a: 83–87; 1782b: 777). Moritz’s slightly edited announcement in the June issue of Deutsches Museum was similar: ‘How far more indispensable to the human race than any pharmacy for the body, would be a doctrine of maladies of the soul [Seelenkrankheitslehre] – which it does not yet have’ (Moritz, 1782b: 777; 1782c: 486). The cases of mental disturbance collected here resembled those previously collected by Krüger (1756) under the generic term Experimental-Seelenlehre. They were granted a special section for ‘psychological examinations’ (Gemüthszustandesuntersuchungen) in Johann Theodor Pyl’s journal published from 1784, Aufsätze und Beobachtungen aus der gerichtlichen Arzneywissenschaft. Moritz’s Magazin led to a decade of engagement with the suggestive, quasi-clinical terms it launched. For instance, in a 1792 contribution, then-editor Salomon Maimon envisioned designing a Seelenarzeneikunde/Seelenarzenei (mental medicine) from the structural example of Körperarzeneikunde/Körperarzenei (somatic medicine; Maimon, 1792: 1). Carl Christian Erhard Schmid (1791: 30) subsumed Seelenkrankheitskunde under theoretische Seelenlehre, and Seelenheilkunde under practische Seelenlehre. Posselt (1795: 590, 591) summarized: ‘Die Seelenkrankheitslehre oder Seelenpathologie ist die Lehre von den Seelenkrankheiten’, while ‘Die Seelenzeichenkunde oder Seelensemiotik ist die Lehre von den bestimmten Kennzeichen der Seelenkrankheiten’ and, finally, ‘Die Seelenheilkunde oder Seelentherapeutik ist die Lehre von den Heilmitteln der Seelenkrankheiten’. Mental disturbances were given a place in the ‘philosophical anthropology’ of Michael Wagner (1756–1821) – who later translated Pinel into German – under the subheading of anthropologische Krankheitslehre (Wagner, 1794: xxviii). In addition to countless exercises in such schematics, specific clinical questions were by now also attracting physicians to Psychologie. Given the problematic mind–body interdependency psychology had been unlocking (apart from eighteenth-century calls for pietistic introspection and dissection of the soul), was morbus amatorius a proper mental disease, and thus properly pertinent to something to be called medicina mentis (Vetter, 1787: 15–18)?

By the end of the eighteenth century, it was well established that empirische Psychologie, or Erfahrungsseelenlehre, extended to both Seelenkrankheitskunde and Seelenheilkunde, as spelled out by Johann August Heinrich Tittmann (1798: 251), a Leipzig University philosopher. By now the specialty consistently begged for its own subdivision. In 1797 Johann Joachim Schmidt published a book Versuch über die psychologische Behandlungsart der Krankheiten des Organs der Seele (Schmidt, 1797; for historical context see: Eckardt, 2001: 160; Leventhal, 2019). He subdivided Heilkunde der Seele into two parts: theoretical (semiotics/symptomatology plus aetiology) and practical (medicine [Heilkunst] in the strict sense, plus dietetics) (Schmidt, 1797: 94–5; cf. Schmidt, 1799–1800). Notably, this derived, unattributed, from Greiling (1794: 447), a book dedicated to CCE Schmid who was mentioned above (not Schmidt). The title of the 1798 German translation of Le Camus (1753) was Grundsätze der praktischen Seelenheilkunde. Herz (1798: 277) classified one of his cases as belonging to psychische Pathologie in which ‘resolution definitely is more incumbent on the philosopher than on the doctor’. A London generalist agreed:

Melancholy, when it depends on immaterial causes, requires physic for the mind rather than for the body; and the frequent conversation with an ingenious friend, of a calm and quiet disposition, will go farther towards a cure than a thousand medicines. (Cornwell, 1787: 99)

In September 1801, Rotterdam physician Lambertus Bicker (1732–1801, the translator into Dutch of Alexander Crichton’s 1798 An Inquiry Into the Nature and Origin of Mental Derangement) observed that psychology had advanced:

in such a way that this knowledge has become a special branch of Medicine that one may justly call Medical Psychology [Geneeskundige Geestkunde], Psychology [Zielkunde] or Psychological Medicine [Geestkundige Geneeskunde] (Psychologia Medica, seu Medicina Psychologica). (Bicker, 1801: v)

Inspired by German literature, a slightly later Dutch work offhandedly proposed the term ‘Ziels-Ziektekunde (Psychologia pathologica)’ (Stierling, n.d. [1809?]: 120). The subtitle of the 1798 German translation of Crichton was System der Physiologie und Pathologie des menschlichen Geistes (‘Physiology and Pathology of the Human Mind’). This phrase was substantively original; however, Amasa Dingley (1794: 29), in his Oratio on the Improvement of Medicine delivered in New York, had already stated that ‘To the praise of this age, the pathology of the mind is considered as a subject of as much utility to medicine as that of the body’. He could only name Benjamin Rush as a native proponent of such a pathology (Rush later coined the term phrenology, circa 1805, to mean science of the mind; see Olry and Haines, 2020: 152). Hoffbauer (1802: vi) wrote about Theorie von den Seelenkrankheiten. Volume 2 of Ploucquet’s (1800) supplemental medical bibliography included a section (still poorly populated with only three items) on psychica therapia (p. 103). By 1805, both Seelenheilkunde and Seelenarzneimittellehre made for substantive chapters in works on anthropologische Psychologie (e.g. Wötzel/Wezel, 1805: 662–76).

Meanwhile, early nineteenth-century French medicine saw a distinction emerging between médicine mentale and médicine morale properly speaking (Moreau, 1816: 396). In 1797, Moreau’s still poorly outlined paraphrases were médecine morale, thérapeutique morale (a genre considered to have only one contributor: Samuel Richardson, the pioneer of the ‘psychological novel’), and médecine sentimentale (Moreau, 1797, 1799: 41). These terms echo a 1792 medical-psychological presentation by an M. Marsillac, seemingly unpublished, entitled ‘Mémoire sur l’influence de la médecine sentimentale et de thérapeutique morale’, as indexed in the Rapports généraux des travaux de la Société philomatique de Paris of that year. A circumspect defence of the term and notion of philosophie de la folie had been offered by Daquin (1791: v, 97). Pinel (1800) used the more clinical-sounding expression traitement médical des aliénés. Thus, Burdach was not the only one trying to name psychiatry in 1808.

Burdach’s Psychiatrie in context

JJ Schmidt (1797), Burdach (1800), G Schmidt (1803a, 1803b) and Reil (1808), among others, posed very similar questions regarding the physiological-philosophical principles of medicine, specifically as they related to the place of mental medicine. It is intriguing to note two of these post-vitalists coming up with the same neologism, though with diverging intentions: one looking back, and the other looking forward. Following a distinction between empiricism, eclecticism and dogmatism in medicine, Burdach (1800, §122) discussed ‘psychiatry’ in a cryptic, single-sentence paragraph, defining it as the one-sided, deterministic study of Man focused strictly on the ‘psychic principle’ (rather than body, chemistry, biometric-biomechanic properties, and inner natural-animal-organic forces) – in other words, as a mistaken medical animism, as had been rejected in numerous earlier texts. Burdach (p. 41) wrote: ‘Die Psychiatrie endlich, sieht in dem Menschen überall nur Würkungen seines geistigen Princips, und leitet aus dessen Thätigkeit alle Erscheinungen am Menschen her, (beurtheilt ihn nach seinen geistigen Kräften)’; in translation: ‘Psychiatry, finally, observes everywhere in Man only the effects of his psychic principle, and derives all phenomena in Man from its activity (judges him according to his psychic powers).’ Dogmatic, or at least monistic, systems focused on only one ‘part of human nature’; risking such misguided inductive reasoning, psychiatry would derive from ‘psychic’ phenomena, as a supreme principle, ‘the explanation of all appearances in healthy, sick and convalescent people’ (p. 41). The term, then, denoted an obsolescent animistic-psychosomatic concept of human functioning and dysfunctioning, one that Burdach’s own psychosomatic view warned readers to avoid. Monistic viewpoints risked halting a holistic, empirical view seeking to arrive at proper appreciation of the precise reach of ‘psychic’ forces among all others (p. 42).

In System der Arzneymittellehre, a book dedicated to Reil among others, Burdach (1807: 73) confirmed that this unelaborated passage referred primarily to what had been called Stahlianismus or (by Tissot and others) Animismus:

Georg Ernst Stahl [1659–1734] saw the inadequacy of this common materialist view [in Boerhaave’s iatromathematics] and rose to the idea that the physical world does not in itself contain the principle of its animation, but that it is caught up in a higher spiritual power, in the anima [Psyche] driving the whole universe and that also underlies the operation of the human body, such that medicinal agents work only in so far as they affect the anima, . . .

That is, what had been called the anima Stahliana.⁸ Medical historian Johann Ludwig Choulant (1791–1861) later distinguished ‘Chemiatriker, Jatromathematiker und Psychiatriker’ (1822: 9; cf. Leupoldt, 1826: 4), perhaps in an unacknowledged reference to Burdach, and indeed with an explicit synonymizing of Psychiatrie and Stahlianismus. This Burdachian synonymy was by now flagged as anachronistic; a review of Choulant (1822) affirmed the nineteenth-century arrival of (Reil’s) Psychiat(e)rie: ‘We can . . . accept this equating all the less since Stahl’s theory of psychic [psychischen] influence has only a very remote relationship with [the current sense of] Psychiatrie, or Seelenheilkunde’ (Anon. 1822: 687). Choulant (1829: 38) took the hint:

Die Psychiatrik, Psychiatrie, psychische Heilkunde, Seelenheilkunde (Psychiatrice, Psychiatria, Medicina psychica), ist derjenige Zweig der Medicin, welcher die an der geistigen Sphäre des Menschen sich außernden Krankheitszustände ärztlich zu behandeln unternimmt, wenn diese nicht blos vorübergebendes Symptom andrer körperlicher Krankheiten sind.

The legacy of Stahl’s ‘psychiatry’ presented a matter of early controversy. Ideler (1835) made the case for animist Stahl and materialist Friedrich Hoffmann as ‘the founders of Seelenheilkunde’, but others disagreed, including Heinroth, as well as his critic, Johann Baptist Friedreich.⁹

Burdach (1800: 20n., 116) was conventional in calling medicine (Arzneykunst, Medicin) Jatrie, from Greek ἰατρεία, meaning medical treatment or healing, though this suggested term only appeared twice, in footnotes. He later maintained this was a ‘new word’ (Burdach, 1822: 8n.), interestingly in a long footnote defending himself against an accusation by Leipzig physician and medical historian Carl Gottlob Kühn (1821: 5) of the misuse of (neo-) Graeco-Latin in his coining of the term Morphologie (Burdach, 1800: 62). Burdach retorted that his 1798 habilitation thesis had focused on Hippocrates. He had clearly been upset by this insult, as his posthumously published autobiography also mentioned it (Burdach, 1848: 332).

Contra, yet not entirely unlike, Stahl’s uncompromising animism, Burdach’s overarching claim was that the phenomena studied in physiology, biochemistry (Anthropochemie), zoology, ‘psychology’ and ‘anthropology’ (i.e. psychosomatics¹⁰) were very intermeshed at the aetiological and (thus) therapeutic levels, and were therefore requisite in equal measure for medicine considered holistically and in its entirety (gesamte Heilkunst). The argument required slippage from the Stahlian anima to the Wolffian psyche:

The art of healing . . . requires psychology [Psychologie], not only with regard to the diseases of the mind, but also for all others, as soon as it wants to claim any degree of completeness and perfection; and she [medicine] also needs her [psychology’s] instruction in order to become acquainted with the remedies which lie in the mental nature of man himself. (Burdach, 1800: 78)

This problem had occupied all early proponents of medical psychology, and the answer provided was widely shared.

So how did Burdach name the debatable specialty of mental medicine? To Burdach (1800), Psychologie (pp. 75–8), or Seelenlehre, particularly extended into what today is called ‘medical psychology’. Some diseases were exclusively mental, Burdach observed, requiring ‘psychology’ all the more. Burdach’s deliberations at this point recall what Johann Daniel Metzger (1787), in an anonymous 48-page pamphlet, had called philosophische Seelenlehre, as opposed to medicinische Seelenlehre. The former ‘isolates the soul, i.e. regards it as a being separate from the body and examines its properties from this point of view’, and the latter ‘examines the soul connected with the body and the phenomena arising from this union as the object of its considerations’ (p. 3). But the precise use of ‘medical psychology’ to physiologists and practising physicians, insinuated on the next page, remained poorly elaborated.

With disappointing progress in mental physiology and neurology, the question at the end of the century was still, ‘How should the pathology of the soul [Pathologie der Seele] be cleared up as soon as possible’ (Metzger, 1798: 96). This striking passage resonated widely in forensic medicine, the specialty voicing the most urgent call for the medical use of psychology; it was quoted in full by Müller (1800: 34–5), for instance. As mentioned, various appeals to practische Seelenlehre, or Erfahrungsseelenlehre, had animated forensic medicine since around the mid-1780s. With fewer theoretical qualms than Burdach, Metzger (1793: 357; 1794: 250) explicitly called for a medicinische Psychologie or psychologia medica. He recommended Moritz’s journal (Metzger, 1793: 358n.), and later lamented its early demise (Metzger, 1805: 426n.), given its significance to legal medicine. Fahner (1797: 30) also lamented what he considered an absence of psychology in forensic medicine.

Halle philosopher Hoffbauer (1808) wrote a pioneering book about this emergent sense of, and widely felt need for, forensic psychiatry. By now, such a specialty had already been named. Berlin physician Gottfried August Heinrich Schmidt (1776–1805) wrote a number of notable, but little known, programmatic pieces on the place within medicine of psychologische Arzeneikunde or psychische Heilkunst or psychologische Arzneimittellehre (Schmidt, 1802; 1803a: 18–19; 1803b: xiii; 1804a); these appeared at the same time as Reil’s (1803) Rhapsodieen and its proposition of psychische Heilmittellehre. Schmidt also identified the need for public and forensic psychiatry: a psychologische/medicinisch-psychologische Polizei (Schmidt, 1803b: 317) or psychische Polizei (Schmidt, 1804a: 74–5) as a new, third part of the wider medicinische Polizei/gerichtliche Arzeneikunde. One of his articles (Schmidt, 1804b) led the editors to add specific footnotes for some etymological clarifications regarding terminology.

Burdach notably failed to make such concrete allusions, though he specifically reflected on legal medicine (1800: 133). After a book review of Hoffbauer (1808) in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung (Halle/Leipzig) of August 15, 1810 (Anon., 1810b), Henke (1812: 16, 117, 133) and Dorn (1813: 9, 240), both crediting Hoffbauer, were apparently the first to have used the phrase gerichtliche Psychologie (forensic psychiatry/psychology) to denote an envisioned, specific subsection of forensic/legal medicine (Staatsarzneikunde, gerichtliche Arzneiwissenschaft). Psychiatrie, clearly, was still not the preferred term around this time. Carl Eduard Böhr (1793–1847) was named in 1820/21 as a lecturer in gerichtliche Psychiatrie at the Berlin University, seemingly the birthplace of this phrasing. He had already published on the subject (Böhr, 1818), and in 1818 had lectured on Die Pathologie und Therapie der Gemüthskrankheiten, and in 1820 on psychische Heilkunde.

To Burdach (1800: 78–80), Anthropologie studied the reciprocal influences of body and mind, in other words psychosomatics. This use seemed to follow Platner (1772: xvi–xvii), who had explicitly lamented the disjunction between Arzneykunst and Seelenlehre (p. v). To Burdach, ‘anthropology’ subsumed Temperamentslehre and Pathematologie (Greek πάθημα, hardship, emotional suffering) ‘which develops the laws known through experience, according to which the actions of the mental being associated with particular liveliness in the human being determine the physical forces in their ability and their deceptions’ (Burdach, 1800: 79). Pathematologia had been sporadically used with reference to the passion of Christ; though uncited, Burdach’s sense echoed Gesenius’s Medicinisch-moralische Pathematologie oder Versuch über die Leidenschaften und ihren Einfluß auf die Geschäfte des körperlichen Lebens (1786). The eponymous term was new-ish, though it reified an extensive tradition in (typically medical) dissertations on the topic of pathemata (affections) going back to the early seventeenth century (a large bibliography is found in Ploucquet, 1796: 280–2). The phrases pathematologia, animi pathologia et therapia and therapia psychica are all attested in a 1797 Latin medical dissertation on mental medicine, incidentally (Langermann, 1797).

For Burdach (1800) ‘psychological semiotics’ (psychologische Semiotik; Zeichenlehre der Geistesgesundheit; pp. 48, 80–1) denoted a general normative mental-medical symptomatology, though distinct from Psychologie (or Lehre von den Seelenwürkungen; p. 51): ‘In order to acquire a complete knowledge of physical and mental health, and thereby to find a norm according to which diseases must be judged, one needs to know the signs relating to them.’ Burdach called psychotherapy Seelenmittellehre (pp. 108–9), for:

[j]ust as the emotions (as voluntary movement) can give rise to the pathological modification of the principle of life, so can they be used as remedies, which are especially used in cases where the disease originally depended on their improper use but, as an aid, are also applicable to other diseases.

An apparent synonym is Psychiamatologie, or Lehre von den geistigen Heilmitteln (the study of mental remedies; pp. 109–10), that is, Psyche+Jamatologie (p. 93). Again, this neologism shows the polysemy of Burdach’s Psyche.

Arguably closest in sense to Reil’s 1808 term Psychiaterie, was Burdach’s besondere (rather than allgemeine) Jatrie/Arnzeikunst, which ‘teaches [how] to heal the individual diseases of the animal and mental nature of man, according to a plan determined by the knowledge of the same’ (p. 116). ‘Psychiatrie’ (Psyche+Jatrie) might have worked well here if modelled on eighteenth-century uses of Psychologie, but that was clearly not the case in Burdach (1800). That Burdach nominally reified psychotherapy (‘psychiamatology’) but had a harder time nominally distinguishing ‘medicine’ and ‘mental medicine’, again reflects his early axiomatic, holistic-psychosomatic viewpoint.

Burdach’s psychosomatics were refined in various works in the next two decades, but he did not re-use Psychiatrie in its original historical sense. He did remain occupied with the question of Arzneymittellehre and did on occasion consider implications for ‘psychology’. In his Physiologie (Burdach, 1810b: 16), for instance, he characterized what he had called Psychiatrie as the philosophy of those Psychiker, ‘who accept the anima [Seele] as grounds for life phenomena’, confirming the conceptual intention behind the earlier neologism. Burdach (1816: 6) reiterated his holistic stance with more explicit reference to medical pertinence: ‘Whoever is unable to recognize and guide the psychological state cannot heal the body either, and whoever does not know how to treat the diseases of the body is unable to be a doctor of the mind [psychischer Arzt].’ In 1811, Burdach notably used the Reilian sense of Psychiatrie once (orthographically tweaked, if he took it from Reil, 1808), when putting forward a point of critique that he had already expressed in 1800:

As in the whole of nature, the dynamic relation is predominant and determining, so, too, medicine proper, which removes chemical-dynamic abnormalities by means of chemical-dynamic remedies, is the comprehensive and fundamental part of the art of healing; it is the common trunk of which surgery and psychiatry [Psychiatrie] make up individual branches; and in that this main part contains the literature on dynamic abnormalities and healing methods, it also comprehends that of abnormalities and healing methods in general. (Burdach, 1811: 1–2)

Reil’s Psychiaterie had come with the same idea that all diseases have their common identity in organic processes, coupled to the observation that psychiatry was involved, in some way or another, in all medical treatment (Reil, 1808: 277–8). To both Reil and Burdach circa 1810, but in clearly different ways, ‘psychiatry’ still importantly voiced the conceptual problem of demarcation that it had, increasingly, been since Stahl.

Reil may have read the term Psychiatrie in Burdach (1800) or any of the few extant reviews mentioning it, but did not cite Burdach in any key text, never acknowledged Burdach’s denotation and advanced a new one, wrote a pertinent monograph-length work and co-launched entire mental-medical journals before adopting the neoclassical term, and initially adopted a spelling variant. After 1800, Burdach himself never claimed coinage and refrained from using it where he could have done so (such as in 1807). In an appendix to the 1811 German translation of Joseph Mason Cox’s 1806 Practical Observations on Insanity, Reil wrote that his 1803 book Rhapsodieen über die Anwendung der psychischen Curmethode auf Geisteszerrüttungen ‘could not help but be imperfect as it was the first, and an attempt, within the sphere of psychiatry [Psychiaterie], which at that time was hardly known by name’ (Reil, 1811: 2). Indeed, it was hardly known by that specific name. The term (psychiaterie) may have entered the Dutch language the next year with a reference to Reil, incidentally, though not with a specific crediting of the neologism (Anon., 1812: 3; a review article taking stock of a decade of medical advancements).

The salience of recalling Burdach (1800) is based on the assumption that the problem of the soul’s unique, emergent place within the medical domain (‘die Sphäre der Psychiaterie’, in Reil’s 1811 terms), articulated differently by the same reifying homonym in Burdach and Reil, informed many of its earliest attestations after 1808. For example, the latest issue of Reil’s Archiv für die Physiologie and the third volume of Burdach’s System der Arzneimittellehre (1809) were reviewed back-to-back in the Medicinisch-chirurgische Zeitung (Anon. 1809b). The first reviewer specifically problematized Reil’s ‘Psychiatrie’ in the light of the hesitation of neuroanatomists, despite Franz Joseph Gall, to deal with the nature of the soul:

Even the worthy author [Reil] does not seem to be entirely free from erroneous ideas about the nature of the soul, as betrayed by some interpretations in the introduction to the present opinion piece and especially by his concept of psychiatry [Psychiatrie] and certain thoughts and opinions that in the psychiatric [psychiatrischen] journals are always contradicting. (p. 229)

Furthermore, emotional perturbations and forms of mental suffering continued to invite formal recognition within medicine beyond Psychiaterie. One 1825 medical dissertation, for instance, toyed with the distinction of adfectologia (doctrina de animi adfectibus) and pathematologia (doctrina de animi pathematibus) (Jeitteles, 1825: 22–3). Burdach (1800), as discussed, already featured the latter term when considering the merits of a dedicated mental-medical specialty. Given that the work is widely known for its neologisms (Biologie and Morphologie, as cited), it is intriguing that seemingly no historian of the behavioural sciences has addressed his early, medico-historiographic use of Psychiatrie.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

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Naming psychiatry: apropos earliest use of the term by Karl Friedrich Burdach (1800)

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Avant la lettre: naming mental medicine before 1800/1808

Burdach’s Psychiatrie in context

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

Notes

References