Heinrich Philipp August Damerow

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Heinrich Philipp August Damerow (born December 28, 1798 in Stettin , † September 22, 1866 in Halle (Saale) ) was a German physician and psychiatrist .

life and work

Damerow was the son of the pastor of the Johanniskirche in Stettin , Ernst Friedrich Damerow. His father died in 1810. He then lived with his mother in the “preacher's widow's house” in the Stettiner Johanniskloster and thus came into contact with the mentally ill cared for there in his youth. He attended the United Royal and City High Schools . In 1815 he stopped attending school and volunteered for the Kolberg hunters to take part in the fight against Napoleon .

In 1817 he passed his Abitur and in the same year began studying at the University of Berlin . With Ernst Horn , a student of Johann C. Reil , and with Karl Georg Neumann , a successor of Horn, he attended psychiatry at the Charité . He studied philosophy with Friedrich Schleiermacher and above all with Georg WF Hegel . He received his doctorate in 1821, completed his habilitation as a private lecturer in Berlin in 1822 and was appointed associate professor of medicine at the University of Greifswald in 1830 . From 1832 he was a confidante of Altenstein at the Board of Trustees for Hospital Affairs and was therefore responsible for insane affairs in the Berlin Ministry. Altenstein had already organized the establishment of an asylum in Siegburg for the Rhine Province together with Maximilian Jacobi . In 1836 Damerow went to Halle as a doctor and director of the provisional “Insane Institute”, then worked for several years in the medical department of the Ministry of Culture in Berlin and did not return to Halle until 1842, where in 1844 he took over the management of the insane institute built according to his plans for the province of Saxony. To take over the Nietleben sanatorium near Halle. In 1858 he was elected a member of the Leopoldina Scholars' Academy . He died on September 22, 1866 of cholera, which was rampant in Halle at the time, and was buried in the institution's own cemetery.

Together with Carl Friedrich Flemming and Christian Friedrich Wilhelm Roller , Damerow founded the general journal for psychiatry and psychological-judicial medicine in 1844 , published by Germany's insane doctors in conjunction with forensic doctors and criminalists (Berlin). It was based on the model of the French magazine Annales . Damerow had been in personal contact with Jean-Étienne Esquirol on the Salpêtrière since 1821 . All founders of the Allgemeine Zeitschrift were also in close contact with the editors of the Annales . The publication of the Allgemeine Zeitschrift represented the climax of institutional psychiatry . At that time it served as a collection point for German psychiatry. As the head of the journal, Damerow represented one of its chief representatives. He not only saw psychiatry from a philosophical-idealistic point of view, but also derived it from state authority. Under the aspect of an anthropologically oriented psychiatry, he tried to integrate the emergence of scientific advances in the field of medicine , which were mostly still influenced by natural philosophy , into psychiatric practice. Both Flemming and Roller also saw themselves as such somatics . In his writing about the “relative connection” of the institutions, Damerow already stood on the book title u. a. as "Director of the physical-medical society in Erlangen" and the "Society of Friends of Nature Research in Halle". As a good patriot, he was also a member of the Silesian Society for Patriotic Culture .

His success was based not least on the support he owed to influential politicians. Among these, in addition to Altenstein after 1840, the Prussian Minister of Education and Culture Eichhorn should be mentioned. With this, however, Damerow came into conflict with the revolutionary aspirations of the 1940s . When Damerow was in charge of the Allgemeine Zeitschrift , it became a state-supporting organ during the revolutionary period. Not only did the doctor's advocacy for the poor have its say. The government also expected forensic psychiatry to be included on an equal footing and in favor of the current political order . The newspaper no longer addressed itself - as usual - to the non-medical public. In this magazine Dietrich Georg von Kieser represented views of the unreasonableness of the insane, especially of the emerging proletariat , as one was already used to. The methods of countering this irrationality were similar to those in the corresponding institutions, such as those in use in France at the time of the Hôpital général . Reason went into the mere concept of order. Education and power state coincided. Karl Wilhelm Ideler took a similar view of state psychiatry . During his era, a medical dissertation entitled De morbo democratico (Eng. "The Democratic Disease") was discussed and accepted by the Berlin faculty. - The Nietleben facility is known for the fact that the assassin Max Sefeloge, who was examined by Damerow, was housed there, cf. Cape. Works (selection) . Unfortunately, the synthesis with the new somatic concepts aimed at by Damerow came too late. The somatics often turned against the philosophical-anthropological superstructure, which favored the rather strict pedagogical concepts of somatotherapy , and committed themselves to a value-free psychiatric science that worked without mechanical constraint ( no restraint ) , as required by university psychiatry .

Damerov's main merit lies in a substantial improvement in the facilities of the insane asylums in Germany.

Fonts (selection)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Meyers Konversations-Lexikon. 4th edition. from 1888–1890.
  2. ↑ a b Citizens Foundation Halle (ed.): Heinrich Philipp August Damerow. (on-line)
  3. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l Klaus Dörner : Citizens and Irre . On the social history and sociology of science in psychiatry. (1969) Fischer Taschenbuch, Bücher des Wissens, Frankfurt am Main 1975, ISBN 3-436-02101-6 ; Review: pp. 303-310, 317; Individual key words (district): (a) to district "Horn, Greifswald": p. 304; (b) on tax office “Madness in the Berlin Ministry”: p. 304; (c) on district “Founding of the lunatic asylum Siegburg”: p. 300; (d) on the district “Irren-, Heil- und Pfleganstalt Nietleben”: p. 304; (e) on taxation “Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie”: p. 303 f .; (f) to district “high point of institutional psychiatry”: p. 303; (g) Re. “Political Conditions for the Management of the Journal”: p. 310; (h) Re. “Insufficient medical integration of scientific advances”: pp. 303–307; (i) on residence “Flemming and Roller as somatics”: p. 305; (j) on Stw. “Damerow's connection to influential politicians”: p. 304 (Altenstein), p. 310 (Eichhorn); (k) on Stw. “The magazine is not used for public relations work, only addressed to specialist groups”: p. 310; (l) on Stw. "Publication of the magazine as a turning point from institutional to university psychiatry": p. 310.
  4. ↑ Member entry of Heinrich Philipp Damerow at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on March 8, 2016.
  5. ^ Ilja Claus: Heinrich Philipp August Damerow . In: Verein für Halle Stadtgeschichte eV (Ed.): Yearbook for Halle Stadtgeschichte 2016 . Janos Stekovics, Halle 2016, ISBN 978-3-89923-365-0 , p. 148 f .
  6. ^ A b c Melchior Josef Bandorf : Damerow, Heinrich. In: Historical commission at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences (Hrsg.): Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie. Volume 4 (1876), pp. 716–717, digital full-text edition in Wikisource (version of January 27, 2013)
  7. ↑ a b c Erwin H. Ackerknecht : Brief history of psychiatry . 3. Edition. Enke, Stuttgart 1985, ISBN 3-432-80043-6 , p. 62.
  8. ↑ Dietrich Georg von Kieser : From the passions and affects. In: General Zschr. Psychiat. 7, 1850, pp. 234-252.
  9. ^ Carl Theodor Groddeck: De morbo democratico, nova insaniae forma. Schlesinger brothers, Berlin 1849 (without autopsy). Whether Justus Hecker - the founder of historical pathology - was the supervisor of this dissertation, which was accepted by the medical faculty in Berlin, could not yet be clarified according to Siegfried Jaeger (psychology-relevant teacher at Berlin University in the 19th century) .
personal data
SURNAME Damerow, Heinrich Philipp August
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German physician and psychiatrist
DATE OF BIRTH December 28, 1798
PLACE OF BIRTH Szczecin
DATE OF DEATH September 22, 1866
Place of death Halle (Saale)