Ebing , Richard Freiherr , von , Krafft- , 1840-1902 , Professor of Psychiatry

Ebing , Richard Freiherr , von , Krafft- , 1840-1902 , Professor of Psychiatry

Richard von Krafft-Ebing was born in Mannheim, Germany, on 14 August 1840; his father was a civil servant of the Grand Duchy of Baden. Krafft-Ebing went to school and university at Heidelberg, where he studied Medicine. His maternal grandfather, Anton Mittermaier, held the chair of Criminal Law there and is considered to have had a significant effect on his grandson's choice of specialisation. After qualifying in 1863, Krafft-Ebing obtained the post of assistant physician at the Illenau asylum near Baden Baden. He was to remain in regular contact with this institution for the remainder of his life, and particularly with two of his former colleagues there, Heinrich Schüle and Wilhelm Erb. After leaving Illenau in 1869, Krafft-Ebing practised as a nerve doctor in Baden Baden, and after military service in the Franco-Prussian War, as director of a local electrotherapeutic institute. Following a brief period as adjunct professor of Psychiatry at the university of Strasbourg in 1872, Krafft-Ebing was appointed to his first post in the Austrian domains, as medical superintendent of Feldhof, the newly established mental asylum of the province of Styria, and to an associated adjunct chair of Psychiatry at the university of Graz.

In 1880 Krafft-Ebing resigned the asylum post to concentrate on teaching and research. He was already a profilic author, specialising in forensic psychiatry, and his first major work, Lehrbuch der gerichtlichen Psychopathologie (1875) was the first textbook in the German-speaking world to concentrate on the interface between psychiatry and the law. With his three-volume Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie auf klinischer Grundlage (1879-80) he established his reputation as a leader in clinical psychiatry. In 1882 Krafft-Ebing was made full professor and five years later Neurology was added to his chair. In 1889 he obtained one of the chairs of Psychiatry at Vienna; then in 1892 he succeeded Theodor Meynert in the second chair, which was associated with a small psychiatric clinic in the university's general hospital. At the same time Krafft-Ebing became president of the Verein für Psychiatrie und forensische Pyschologie, the leading professional organisation for psychiatrists in Austria. In 1886 Krafft-Ebing published Psychopathia sexualis, the work for which he would become best known. In effect this was a catalogue of case histories of abnormal sexual fantasies and practices drawn from numerous sources. Although intended as a manual for the medical and legal professions it soon gained a wider readership, and as one edition followed another more and longer case histories were included, and a greater proportion of the cases described were Krafft-Ebing's own. To some extent the book itself generated the case histories, as patients read it and were moved to correspond with its author, and sometimes visit him. The work ultimately ran to 17 German-language editions, and was translated into at least 5 foreign languages (earliest English edition 1892). In addition to his institutional roles, Krafft-Ebing practiced privately. In 1886 he founded a sanatorium in the suburbs of Graz, Mariagrün, for wealthy patients suffering from a range of nervous disorders, especially neurasthenia. It was in this private sphere that Krafft-Ebing found greater professional and scientific satisfaction, and he resigned his chair at Vienna in early 1902 to concentrate on writing and the sanatorium in Graz. However, his health was not good and he died on 22 December 1902, aged sixty-two, just after completing the 12th edition of Psychopathia sexualis.