Serbsky

SERBSKY Vladimir Petrovich (1855–1917), professor of psychiatry in Moscow, a prominent representative of the Moscow psychiatric school. After graduating from the university, he was a physician at the M. F. Becker clinic, and then after several years of work at the Tambov psychiatric hospital, he took the position of assistant in the newly opened psychiatric clinic of the Moscow university in 1887; in 1892 he defended his dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Medicine, and in 1900, after the death of Korsakov, he took his chair, which he directed until 1911, when, as a protest against the actions of the reactionary Minister of Education Kasso, he left the university. After the February Revolution, S. was reinstated on the chair, receiving news of this almost on the eve of his death. As a clinician, S. was a consistent supporter of Korsakov's views and, entirely adhering to the teachings of pre-crepelinian psychiatry, waged a passionate struggle with the ideas of Kraepelin. His significance in Russian psychiatry is mainly determined by his public activity: he was a longtime comrade of the chairman of the Moscow Society of Psychiatrists and Neuropathologists, the founder and active editor of the society's journal ("Journal of Neuropathology and Psychiatry named after Korsakov") and one of the founders and most active leaders of the Russian Union of Psychiatrists and Neuropathologists. Distinguished by sincere conviction, straightforwardness, and consistency, S. always defended his views to the end and unswervingly fought, without caring about the consequences, against the arbitrariness of the tsarist government. In addition to the very valuable dissertation "Forms of mental disorders described under the name of catatonia" (critical and clinical studies, Moscow, 1891), and many minor works, among which special place is occupied by articles devoted to the development of the doctrine of the Korsakov psychosis, S. wrote an extensive course on forensic psychopathology, which retains a certain significance even to the present time, and a brief textbook of psychiatry.