Wilhelm Mayer-Gross

Wilhelm Mayer-Gross (after 1933 also partly William Mayer-Gross) (born January 15, 1889 in Bingen am Rhein , † February 15, 1961 in Birmingham ) was a German-British psychiatrist.

Life and activity

Early career

Mayer-Gross was a son of the businessman Max Mayer and his wife Mathilde, nee. Large. He attended elementary school in his hometown and then high school in Worms. He then studied medicine in Heidelberg, Kiel and Munich. He passed the medical state examination in Heidelberg in the summer of 1912.

In 1912 Mayer-Gross became assistant to the brain pathologist Franz Nissl at the Psychiatric Clinic in Heidelberg. In 1914 he submitted a dissertation on the phenomenology of abnormal feelings of happiness.

At the beginning of the First World War, Mayer-Gross was deployed on the Western Front for a year before he was transferred to a home hospital in Heidelberg in 1915, where he took over the management of the psychiatric department.

In 1918 he returned to the Heidelberg Clinic, whose management had now been taken over by Karl Wilmanns , whose assistant he became. He remained in this position - with two short breaks for research stays in Klingenmünster and Rheinau in Switzerland - until 1924. In that year he completed his habilitation with a thesis on .... as a private lecturer in psychiatry. He was also appointed deputy director of the clinic that year. He was appointed associate professor in Heidelberg in 1929.

In Heidelberger, Mayer-Gross belonged to the so-called Heidelberg School, which focused on researching the phenomenology of mental illnesses. Besides Mayer-Gross himself, Jaspers and Gruhle were among the most important representatives of this school. Conversely, he was a sharp opponent of Freud's analytical psychology, which he later dismissed in his psychiatric handbook as "[a] superficial, rational approach under the cloak of science" and the "most successful form of health prayer" of his time, which is why he does so The postulate was to go through the phase of quackery and transform psychiatry into a "real science".

In 1928 Mayer-Gross helped found the neuropsychiatric journal Der Nervenarzt , of which he was one of the editors until 1933. Around 1932 he was offered a professorship in Göttingen, which he could no longer accept due to the rapidly changing political situation in Germany soon after.

Emigration to Great Britain until World War II (1933 to 1945)

After the National Socialists came to power in the spring of 1933, Mayer-Gross was politically marginalized in Germany because of his - according to National Socialist definition - Jewish descent: Alongside Wilmanns, he was one of four lecturers at the Heidelberg Clinic who were eventually removed from the clinic for racial reasons: he left first took leave of absence in 1933 and went to London's Maudsley Hospital on a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation , where his colleagues Alfred Meyer and Erich Guttmann also stayed .

In Great Britain, Mayer-Gross developed into one of the leading representatives of psychiatry in this country and into an important promoter of the further development of the state of psychiatric research in Great Britain: While in the 1930s this was viewed by most experts as backward by European standards , was the British psychiatric research in the 1950s already as one of the internationally leading, for which u. a. the impulses that emigrants like Mayer-Gross had provided were held responsible. He himself was named in an obituary in the British Medical Journal in 1961 as "the most outstanding figure" of what was then "European psychiatry" and was acknowledged to be more responsible than anyone else for "that British psychiatry continues to move within the European tradition, in which she plays a leading role. " Accordingly, his influence on the British psychiatric research of his time and on the researchers of the following generations was correspondingly great.

In the German Reich, meanwhile, he was classified as an enemy of the state by the National Socialist authorities: In 1936 his license to teach in Germany was officially revoked.

In 1939 Mayer-Gross took over the management of the clinical research department at the psychiatric clinic of the Crichton Royal Hospital in Dumfries, Scotland. In this position he officially received the rank of director of clinical research . He remained in this post until he retired in 1955. After that he continued to work at the clinic as a consultant .

Post war career

In addition to his work at the psychiatric clinic in Dumfries, Mayer-Gross worked intensively in the first few years after the war on a reference work on psychiatry. The result was the handbook Clinical Psychiatry , which he, together with his colleagues Eliot Slater and Martin Roth, published for the first time in 1954 at Cassel. This work soon achieved the status of a standard work: for more than two decades it was generally regarded as the leading textbook in this subject in the Anglo-Saxon language area. The work has been reprinted several times and translated into numerous languages.

In 1945 Mayer-Gross became a member of the Royal College of Physicians in London. In 1951 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and from 1954 to 1955 he served as President of the Psychiatric Section of the Royal Society of Medicine.

As a retiree, Mayer-Gross was a Senior Fellow at the Department of Experimental Psychiatry in Birmingham and helped found the Uffculme Clinic.

From 1951 to 1952 and 1956 to 1957, Mayer-Gross stayed in India on behalf of the World Health Organization (WHO) to set up a center for psychiatric training and research in Bangalore .

In Germany, Mayer-Gross was granted the rights of a professor emeritus in 1955 as part of reparation proceedings for the damage he had suffered from the Nazi regime.

In 1958 Mayer-Gross spent a few months as a visiting lecturer at the Neurological Clinic of the University of Munich and in 1960 a few months at the Psychiatric Clinic of the University of Hamburg .

family

Mayer-Gross had been married since 1919 and had a son.

Fonts

• "On the phenomenology of abnormal feelings of happiness", in: Zeitschrift für Pathopsychologie, 2nd year (1914), pp. 588–610.
• Self-portrayals of confusion. The oneiroid form of experience , Berlin 1924. (Habilitation)
• Pathology of Perception, 1928.
• "On Depersonalization", in: The British Journal of Medical Psychology Vol. 15, 1936, pp. 103-122. (Translation: "Zur Depersonalisation", in Joachim Ernst Meyer: Depersonalisation , 1968, pp. 187-208)
• The Clinical Examination of Patients with Cerebral Disease , 1957.
• Clinical Psychiatry , 1954. (Reprinted in 1977 as Mayer Gross, Slater and Roth's Clinical Psychiatry , 1977)

literature

General :

• Cyril Greenland: "At the Crichton Royal with William Mayer-Gross (b. Jan 15, 189; d. Feb. 15, 1961)", History of Psychiatry 13 (2002), pp. 467-477.
• A Lewi: "William Mayer-Gross. An Appreciation" in: Psychological Medicine 7 (1977), pp. 11-18.
• Dagmar Drüll: Heidelberg scholars lexicon . 1803-1932. Springer, Berlin et al. 1986, ISBN 0-387-15856-1 , p. 174 f.
• Wolfgang U. Eckart / Volker Sellin / Eike Wolgast (eds.): The University of Heidelberg in National Socialism, Heidelberg 2006, p. 911f.
• Theo R. Payk: Psychiatrist: Researcher in the Labyrinth of the Soul , 2000, p. 178.

Obituaries :

• British Medical Journal dated February 25, 1961.

Entries in reference works :

• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
• William D. Rubinstein / Michael Jolles / Hilary L. Rubinstein: The Palgrave Dictionary of Anglo-Jewish History , p. 655.

Web links

• Biography at the Royal Society