Emil Kraepelin

Emil Wilhelm Georg Magnus Kraepelin was born 15 February 1856 in Germany and trained as a psychiatrist at a time when the field had no shared language for disease. He argued that psychiatric disorders arose from biological and genetic malfunction, not moral weakness or bad spirits, and set about classifying them with what he called rigorous clinical standards—though he also relied on observations from officials with no psychiatric training. His textbooks compiled typical statements and behaviors into diagnostic mosaics rather than detailed individual case histories, a method that made him both…