Ludwig Snell (medic)

Ludwig Daniel Christian Snell (born October 18, 1817 in Nauheim , † June 12, 1892 in Hildesheim ) was a German psychiatrist and insane asylum director. He was a sought-after expert in the planning of insane asylums and founded the first state-run agricultural colony in Germany. With his research he contributed to the dissolution of the concept of "unit psychosis" and paved the way for research into paranoia as an independent disease.

Live and act

Snell came from an old Nassau scholarly family of educators , philosophers and naturalists . Grandfather Christian Wilhelm Snell , high school supervisor and director of the Weilburg grammar school , had written a popular philosophy manual together with his brother Friedrich Wilhelm Daniel Snell , a professor of philosophy in Giessen . Ludwig Snell was the son of pastor Johann Friedrich Snell. He grew up in Laufensfelden im Taunus and was privately tutored by his father until he graduated from the University of Gießen in 1834. He then studied medicine in Giessen, Heidelberg and Würzburg . After receiving his doctorate in 1839, he got a job as a state-paid general practitioner in Hochheim in 1841 .

In 1844 Snell was commissioned to plan a new insane asylum in Hessen-Nassau. On behalf of the government he traveled 13 months through Germany, to Vienna and Paris in order to obtain further psychiatric education and to visit various asylums. In 1845 he took the position of doctor at the correctional and insane asylum in Eberbach . With the opening of the Eichberg insane asylum, which he had largely planned, on October 19, 1849, he became its first director. In 1856 he accepted a call to the Kingdom of Hanover to take over the Hildesheim insane asylum .

The lunatic asylum in Göttingen after 1872, lithograph by Robert Geißler

The capacity of the Hildesheim establishment was already exhausted when Snell took office. After a study trip undertaken in 1862, which took him to Holland , Belgium and France , in 1864 he founded the first agricultural insane colony in Germany in Einum near Hildesheim on the lands of the tax forest state domain . The model for this was the Fitz-James (1847) insane colony founded in 1847 by the Labitte brothers in Clermont, who were said to have become millionaires through the profits of the colony. In the Hildesheim “horticultural colony”, however, the hoped-for economic success did not initially materialize; however, because of its therapeutic success, the colony became known nationwide. Snell also played a leading role in founding two insane asylums in Göttingen (1866) and Osnabrück (1868), which still brought together all patients and doctors under one roof in the corridor system. In the years that followed, Snell was in great demand as a consultant for the building of insane asylums and was involved in institutional planning in the Rhine Province around the 1870s . In 1865 he founded the “Association of Insane Doctors of Lower Saxony and Westphalia”, which he headed until his death. In Hildesheim he also founded the “Association for Art and Science” together with Hermann Roemer .

But Snell also did clinical psychiatric research. The best known was his contribution "Monomania as a primary form of soul disorder" (1865), with which he contradicted the prevailing doctrine of Wilhelm Griesinger that mental disorders accompanied by delusional ideas always developed secondary from the primary affect disorders. In doing so, he not only undermined the doctrine of “unitary psychosis”, but also founded the doctrine of paranoia as a special type of mental disorder. Griesinger then recognized that madness could also occur primarily.

Snell asked for his retirement in the fall of 1891, but this was not approved until July 1, 1892. In January 1892 he fell ill with influenza from which he was no longer to recover. Two of his sons, Otto Snell and Richard Snell , also became psychiatrists and clinic directors. His daughter Emma (1860–1951) was married to the psychiatrist Julius Bartels (1860–1940). His daughter Berta (1853–1879) was married to the district administrator Karl von Delius (1840–1907) in his first marriage. A grandson was the philologist and rector of the Hamburg University Bruno Snell .

Fonts

• Information about an agricultural colony for the mentally ill set up in Hildesheim. In: Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie und psychisch-gerichtliche Medicin , Volume 21, 1864, pp. 46-48 ( digitized version ).
• About monomania as the primary form of soul disorder. In: Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie und psychisch-gerichtliche Medicin , Volume 22, 1865, pp. 368–381 ( digitized version ).
• The arable colony in Einum. In: Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie und psychisch-gerichtliche Medicin , Volume 31, 1875, pp. 675-679 ( digitized version ).
• The overestimation ideas in paranoia. In: Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie und psychisch-gerichtliche Medicin , Volume 46, 1890, pp 447-460 ( digitized version ).

literature

• Erich Gerstenberg: Nekrolog Ludwig Snell . In: Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie , Vol. 49 (1893), pp. 320-329, ISSN  0365-8570
• Theodor Kirchhoff :  Snell, Ludwig . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 54, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1908, p. 371.
• Wilhelm Rothert : General Hannoversche Biography , Volume 2: In the Old Kingdom of Hanover 1814–1866 ; Hanover: Sponholtz, 1914, pp. 463-467
• Otto Snell: Ludwig Snell . In: Theodor Kirchhoff (Ed.): Deutsche Irrenärzte. Individual pictures of their life and work, vol. 1 . J. Springer Verlag, Berlin 1921, pp. 357-379.
• Michael Schmidt-Degenhard: Ludwig Snell (1817-1892) . In: Jahrbuch für Stadt und Stift Hildesheim , Vol. 60 (1989), pp. 83-98, ISSN  0944-3045
• Rainer Tölle: Science and Practice. At the psychiatric conference in Hanover in 1865 . In: Der Nervenarzt , Vol. 77 (2006), No. 11, pp. 1373-1377, ISSN  0028-2804 doi : 10.1007 / s00115-006-2177-9
• Rainer Tölle: Research in the institution: Ludwig Snell 1817-1892. In: Krankenhauspsychiatrie , Vol. 17 (2006), pp. 165-172, ISSN  0937-289X doi : 10.1055 / s-2006-954988