Clemens Ernst Benda

Clemens Ernst Benda (born May 30, 1898 in Berlin , † April 18, 1975 in Munich ) was a German-American neurologist and psychiatrist . Benda was u. a. known for his contributions to the study of Down syndrome .

Life and activity

Benda was a son of Carl Benda, a professor of pathology, and his wife Louise, nee. Rhode. After attending school, he studied medicine at the universities of Rostock, Jena and Heidelberg from 1919 to 1921. In 1922 he received his doctorate in Berlin. med. He received his license to practice medicine in the same year. Karl Jaspers and Ludwig Binswanger were among his teachers .

From 1922 to 1923 Benda worked as an assistant at the psychiatric university clinic in Heidelberg, from where he moved to Switzerland. From 1924 to 1927 he worked as an assistant at Ludwig Binswanger's psychiatric clinic in Kreuzlingen ( Bellevue Sanatorium ). He then worked from 1927 to 1928 in the neurological department of the Hamburg-Barmbeck Clinic and then from 1928 to 1929 at the University of Hamburg .

In 1929 Benda moved to the Charité in Berlin. From 1929 to 1935 he was head of the neurological department of the Red Cross Hospital and the Augusta Heilanstalt in Berlin. In addition to his medical work, he was the editor of the specialist journal Medizinische Welt .

After the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, Benda decided to emigrate to the United States in the mid-1930s because of his Jewish descent. In 1935 he came to Boston , Massachusetts, where he was a Research Fellow in Psychiatry and Neuropathology with Stanley Cobb , director of the Department of Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital . The following year, 1936, on Cobb's recommendation, he was appointed director of the Wallace Research Laboratory for the Study of Mental Deficiency, a research center based at Wrentham State School for Retarded Children, becoming the first person to hold the post of director of research in a Institution for the mentally retarded in the United States.

In 1947, Benda became a research director and clinical psychiatrist at the WE Fernald School of Retarded Children in Waverly, Massachusetts. At times he also taught as a visiting professor in Munich.

In 1963, Benda retired as a university professor and researcher, but continued to run a psychiatric practice. During these years he published two books in which he laid out the foundations of the concept of an existentialist psychiatry he had developed. The focus of these writings was on psychological and psychiatric aspects of the complexes of conscience and guilt, which he applied to questions of philosophy, religion, law and politics.

Benda's abandoned papers are now in the Countway Medical Library at Harvard Medical School.

Benda was a member of numerous professional organizations: he was a member of the Council of the Association of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, the American Neurological Association, an associate member of the Royal Society of Medicine of Great Britain. He is also a Fellow of the America Psychiatric Association, member of the American Association of Neuropathologists (also President in 1952), the American Academy of Mental Retardation (also President in 1960), the American Association of Mental health and the American Medical Association. He was also a diplomat for the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology.

research

The main subjects of research that Benda dealt with were cretinism , mental retardation , existential psychology and psychiatry, and in particular Down's syndrome .

Benda made the majority of his contributions to the study of Down syndrome nearly two decades before Jerome LeJeune and other researchers identified chromosomal abnormalities as the cause of Down syndrome.

Benda published his first study on Down syndrome in 1946: In this work he compared and contrasted Mongolism (Down syndrome) and cretinism as two different forms of mental retardation. His main interest was the aim of determining the reasons why Down's syndrome occurs in people affected by it, whereby he came to the opinion that a fetal growth disorder was the factor causing this undesirable development. Anatomically he saw in Down syndrome a stunted growth and thus the opposite of acromegaly . He published a revised version of this work in 1960 under the title The Children with Mongolism (Congenital Acromicria) .

Benda's theories on the etiology of Down's syndrome are largely considered obsolete in research today. In contrast, his detailed reports on the clinical, anatomical and pathological properties of Down syndrome are widely referenced in the relevant research and literature to this day. In the last version of this work he therefore recognized the etiological importance of chromosomal abnormality as the cause of the appearance of Down syndrome, but at the same time defended the scientific validity of his clinical, anatomical and pathological observations.

In the third version of his work (Down's Syndrome Mongolism and its Management), Benda also dealt with the best ways to care for children affected by Down's syndrome. In his opinion, it depended on the individual case as to whether care at home or institutionalization should be preferred as a method. Finally, he emphasized the social integrability of Down children and their ability to function within society, provided they are properly prepared for this.

A textbook on disorders of mentation and cerebral palsies that Benda presented in 1952 was a widely used work for many years. In this he tries to get a better understanding of the neuropsychiatric aspects of mental disorders in children by incorporating clinical, neurological, physiological and pathological discoveries into the previous paradigm.

Honors

Benda has received many awards for his contributions to neurological and neuropsychological research into numerous clinical pictures:

In 1949, Benda received the Association for the Help of Retarded Children award for his research into various forms of mental retardation.

In 1969 Benda was awarded the Heinrich Hoffmann Medal for achievements in the field of child psychiatry.

Fonts

• The will to the spirit: on freedom of will and the structure of the spiritual world , 1932.
• Mongolism and Cretinism , 1946.
• Developmental Disorder of Mentation and Cerebral Palsies , 1952.
• The Image of Love: Modern Trends in Psychiatric Thinking , 1961.
• The Child with Mongolism: Congenital Acromicria , 1960.
• Man in the age of lovelessness , 1961.
• Down's Syndrome. Mongolism and Its Management , 1969.
• Conscience and Guilt , 1970.

literature

• Gwendolyn R Hogan: Clemens Benda , in: Stephen Ashwal (Ed.): The Founders of Child Neurology , pp. 420-425.
• PI Yakovlev: Clemens Ernst Benda , in: Journal of Neuropathological Exp Neur , Jg. 34, 1975, pp. 549f.
• The National Cyclopædia of American Biography: Being the History of the United States as Illustrated in the Lives of the Founders, Builders, and Defenders of the Republic, and of the Men and Women who are Doing the Work and Molding the Thought of the Present Time , Vol. 61, p. 53.
• DBE , 1995, p. 413.