[The French-language works of Wladimir Serbski]

The only thing for which Serbski is known nowadays is that, following his death in 1917, the Institute of Medico-Legal Psychiatry in Moscow was named after him. It was here, half a century later, that was made the diagnosis of sluggish schizophrenia from the observation of numerous dissidents. Yet the biography of this pupil and successor of Korsakov is that of a liberal, who championned the cause of human rights under the ancient regime, and in particular those of the mentally ill. His theoretical writings, published in the medico-psychological Annales in 1903-1904, are a contribution to the critique made by the French speaking school of the extended conception of dementia praecox developed by Kraepelin in 1899, and taken up by Bleuler in 1911, with his description of the group of schizophrenias. Serbski does not then deserve the opprobrium which the proper condemnation of the use of psychiatry for political issues has inflicted up on his name.