Esquirol

Esquirol Jean-Étienne-Dominique (Jean Etienne Esquirol; 1772-1840), famous French psychiatrist, one of the founders of scientific psychiatry, who created a school from which all major French psychiatrists of the first half of the 19th century emerged. He graduated from the medical faculty in Toulouse. After several years of work in Montpellier, he came to Paris (during the French Revolution), where he met Pinel and began working at the Salpêtrière under his direction. In 1800, E. opened a private clinic for the mentally ill in Paris, in 1802 he published his first work "Medico-philosophical treatise," in 1805 - a dissertation "Affects considered as causes, symptoms, and methods of treatment of mental disorders," and from 1817 he began teaching a course in clinical psychiatry at the Salpêtrière, which continued until the end of his life. In the same year, he presented to the Paris Academy of Sciences a report "On hallucinations in the mentally ill," in which he for the first time drew a distinction between hallucinations and illusions. In 1825, E. moved from the Salpêtrière to the position of director of the hospital at Charenton (near Paris), where he remained until his death. The last decade of his life was marked by the publication of the "Law of June 30, 1838" on the examination of the mentally ill, developed under his direction, which created legal guarantees for the correctness of recognizing persons with mental disorders as mentally ill, and the publication of a two-volume guide to mental diseases ("Des maladies mentales", v. I-II, P., 1838). Skillfully written, full of brilliant artistic descriptions of pathological pictures, this guide became the foundation on which all later clinical psychiatry developed. E. firmly established the basic principle of all modern psychiatry regarding the need to consider not only mental but also somatic symptoms of diseases, and developed the doctrine of monomanias that long prevailed in French psychiatry.