Wilhelm Sander (medic, 1838)

Wilhelm Sander (1838–1922)

Wilhelm Sander (born June 24, 1838 in Haynau , Goldberg-Haynau district , Lower Silesia Province , † January 1, 1922 in Berlin ) was a German psychiatrist and from 1887 to 1914 director of the Dalldorf insane asylum in Berlin . The Wilhelm Sander House of the I. Department of Forensic Psychiatry of the Karl Bonhoeffer Clinic in Reinickendorf , which opened in 1987, is named after him.

Life

Sander, who was of Jewish origin, studied medicine at the Universities of Breslau and Berlin. Soon after his doctorate in 1860 and his license to practice medicine in 1861, he turned to psychiatry. At the same time as Carl Pelman, he volunteered at the Siegburg insane asylum under the direction of Friedrich Hoffmann . From 1862 to 1870 Sander was an assistant doctor at the Berlin Charité , where he was strongly influenced by Wilhelm Griesinger . In 1869 he completed his habilitation in psychiatry and forensic medicine and became head of the Charité smallpox ward .

In 1870, Sander joined the city of Berlin as the second doctor at the insane food institution. In 1880 he took over the medical management of the infirmary department of the new urban insane asylum in Dalldorf. In 1887 he became director of the entire institution, including the "idiot education institution" attached to it. He kept the head of the institution until he retired on October 1, 1914. Since 1876 he was also a member of the Medical College of the Province of Brandenburg as a medical assessor. In this capacity he was appointed Medical Councilor in 1884 and the Secret Medical Councilor in 1894. After the death of Carl Westphal , he chaired the Berlin Neurological-Psychiatric Society for several years. Sander was married but remained childless. He died on January 1, 1922 of complications from benign prostatic hyperplasia .

plant

Sander made his name as a psychiatrist with a work “About a special form of primary madness”, which appeared in the first year of Griesinger's new magazine “ Archive for Psychiatry and Nervous Diseases ” in 1868/69 . In it he worked out a group from case histories in which the “primary” stage required by the school opinion of the time could not be proven, a group he called “original paranoia ”. In the absence of acute conditions, this mental illness gradually develops from the particular disposition of character and mind into complete madness. To a certain extent, Sander's method anticipated clinical observation, which was to gain general validity in German psychiatry only after the work of Emil Kraepelin . Sander himself took the view that psychiatry should be based on pathological anatomy. In another work, “On Memory Deception”, he advocated that medicine should abandon its fear of psychological deductions and analyze elementary psychological ideas. In describing the phenomenon of " déjà-vu ", he also replaced the misleading but widespread term "double perception" with the new term "memory deception."

In the following years, however, Sander concentrated on his work as an institution director and psychiatric expert. Together with his assistant doctor Alfred Richter, he published in 1886 "The Relationship Between Mental Disorder and Crime". This collaborative effort, in which Sander mainly discussed the statistics of the criminally insane and vigorously rejected the institutions for mentally ill offenders demanded by many colleagues at the time, was his first publication in book form and at the same time his last ever.

In Dalldorf, Sander relied on “non-restraint” on the one hand. On the other hand, he promoted family insane care, an early form of social psychiatry. As the director of the institution, he embodied the type of the “mad father”. He was said to have been able to remember the individual fates of tens of thousands of patients well into old age. He was not a fan of bureaucracy and regulations and gave his subordinates a lot of leeway. “A streak of local patriarchalism and tolerance in Dalldorf,” Paul Bernhardt noted, “is Sander's legacy.” Sander was considered a modest and undemanding personality, religiously indifferent and with classical music as his only passion.

Publications

• De morborum Hereditate nonnulla. Dissertatio inauguralis medica, Berlin 1860.
• About a special form of primary madness . In: Archive for Psychiatry , Vol. 1, 1868, pp. 387-419.
• About delusions of memory . In: Archive for Psychiatry , Vol. 4, 1874, pp. 244-253. ( Limited preview in Google Book Search) ( Concerning Memory Deceptions . In: History of Psychiatry , Vol. 8, 1997, pp. 555-567.)
• & A. Richter: The Relationships Between Insanity And Crime. After observations in the lunatic asylum Dalldorf . Berlin 1886.

literature

• Paul Bernhardt: Wilhelm Sander . In: Theodor Kirchhoff (ed.): German insane doctors. Individual images of their life and work , Vol. 2, Berlin 1924, pp. 156–160.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Paul Bernhardt: Wilhelm Sander. In: Theodor Kirchhoff (Ed.): Deutsche Irrenärzte. Individual images of their life and work. Volume 2. Berlin 1924, pp. 156-168.
2. ↑ Snippset view on Google Books
3. ^ HP Schmiedebach, S. Priebe: Social psychiatry in Germany in the twentieth century: ideas and models. In: Medical history. Volume 48, Number 4, October 2004, pp. 449-472, PMID 15535474 , PMC 546367 (free full text).
4. ^ Bernhardt: Wilhelm Sander. Pp. 158-160.