[Psychiatry at Leipzig University. A 200 year old tradition]

The University of Leipzig boasts a long tradition in the field of psychiatry. In 1811 Johann Christian August Heinroth was appointed as the first professor of mental health ("psychic therapy") in Europe. He conceived mental illness as based on a person's own guilt, as the consequence of turning away from God and living a life untrue to Christian ethics. After Heinroth retired in 1843 the Leipzig chair remained vacant until 1878 brain researcher Paul Flechsig succeeded him as professor of psychiatry, although not significantly contributing to the progress of this subject. His first assistant was Emil Kraepelin. Flechsig's successors, Oswald Bumke and Paul Schroder, included psychological as well as sociogenetic topics in their research. The latter did pioneering work for the institutionalization of child and adolescent psychiatry. The history of Leipzig psychiatry during the Nazi years has not yet been researched in depth. So far, however, no evidence has been found to prove the university hospital's involvement in German psychiatry's excruciating crimes on patients. It is true, however, that as elsewhere doctors of the Leipzig hospital were members of the Courts of Hereditary Health (Erbgesundheitsgericht) and that e.g. August Bostroem knew of the homicides. In 1943, during the directorship of Werner Wagner, the hospital was totally destroyed. Its reconstruction was mainly the work of Richard Arwed Pfeifer, who also made remarkable contributions to the study of the angiostructure of the brain. With Dietfried Muller-Hegemann, who had a major influence of East-German psychotherapy, the social psychiatric era began, and it was successfully continued under Berhard Schwarz, Klaus Weise and the hospital's present head, Matthias C. Angermeyer, Weise's theoretical and philosophical achievements in the foundation and his demand for an empirical verification of social psychiatric ideas in the whole of Germany are acknowledged until the present day. Last but no least it was him who from 1975 on first tried to implement these concepts into practice in Leipzig.