Wilhelm Weygandt

Wilhelm Weygandt

Wilhelm Christian Jakob Karl Weygandt (born September 30, 1870 in Wiesbaden ; † January 22, 1939 there ) was a German psychiatrist and from 1908 to 1934 director of the Hamburg State Hospital Friedrichsberg . From 1919 until his retirement in spring 1934, he was also first professor of psychiatry at the University of Hamburg . His main focus was on child and adolescent psychiatry , experimental psychology , forensics, and psycho- and racial hygiene . In the first third of the 20th century he was regarded as the most important German authority in the field of research and care for “juvenile nonsense ”.

Life

Wilhelm Weygandt was born the son of the businessman Wilhelm Weygandt and his wife Elise. After graduating from high school in 1889, he first studied German , philosophy and theology at the University of Strasbourg . In the summer semester of 1891 he switched to studying philosophy, pedagogy and German at the University of Leipzig . In 1892 he began studying medicine .

In Strasbourg he received his doctorate in philosophy in 1893 with a thesis on the "Origin of Dreams " under Wilhelm Wundt . At the same time he continued his medical studies in Freiburg, Berlin and Heidelberg. In 1896 he received his doctorate from the Medical Faculty with a contribution to the " Histology of Syphilis of the Central Nervous System " in Würzburg with Konrad Rieger . From 1897 to 1899 he was an assistant doctor to Emil Kraepelin at the Heidelberg University Clinic and in 1899 again completed his habilitation with Rieger “On the mixed states of manic-depressive insanity ”. The appointment as associate professor in 1904 at the University of Würzburg , where Weygandt was successful in the treatment of thyroid diseases ( cretinism ) and ran a neurological polyclinic with privately rented rooms, was followed in 1908 by Daniel Wilhelm Reyes being appointed director of the state hospital Friedrichsberg . With reference to his work in Friedrichsberg, Weygandt turned down professorships for psychiatry in Greifswald and Rostock in 1912 and 1916 respectively . During the First World War he set up a department for mentally ill soldiers in Friedrichsberg. Weygandt advocated efforts to found a university in Hamburg. In 1919 he received the chair for psychiatry at the newly founded University of Hamburg.

Politically, Weygandt was liberal and nationalistic . As recently as 1918 he attested the Germans “lack of national self-confidence and pride” and rejected readiness for peace as a weakness. From 1919 to 1928 he was a member of the left-liberal German Democratic Party . He was also a Freemason in a humanitarian lodge with a national character until 1931 .

Weygandt welcomed the takeover of power by the National Socialists in 1933 and applied for membership in the NSDAP on May 15, 1933 (his admission, however, was refused). In November 1933 he was one of the signatories of the professors' commitment at German universities and colleges to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist state . Nonetheless, he was attacked by the Hamburg physician leader Willy Holzmann , who accused him of lack of “National Socialist instincts” and favoring Jews. At first sight, the - already ended - membership in a lodge was taken as an occasion to revoke Weygandt's already approved extension of teaching activities and to dismiss him at the age of 63 at the end of 1933 or March 31, 1934. Presumably it was a hindrance to Holzmann, who wanted to fill the key positions in the area of ​​racial hygiene with people they could trust. Weygandt's international travel to congresses was restricted in the following years. Wegandt's successor as clinic director was provisionally Ernst Rittershaus in 1934 , who in turn was replaced in 1936 by Hans Bürger-Prinz .

Weygandt moved back to Wiesbaden in 1937. He suffered more from the asthma that had plagued him since he was a student. He died in Wiesbaden on January 22nd, 1939.

plant

Weygandt was an exceptionally versatile researcher. Even with his philosophical dissertation, in which, in contrast to Sigmund Freud, he took a strictly empirical approach, he was one of the most important theorists in dream research at the end of the 19th century. In psychiatry he worked in the border area between neurology and psychiatry on growth anomalies, endocrine disorders, neurasthenia , aphasia , syphilis and "idiocy". He has written a number of textbooks on general psychiatry, diagnostics, forensics and child psychiatry. In total, the number of his publications adds up to over 600. These also include literary works such as a comedy in Upper Bavarian dialect, three volumes of poetry and works on psychopathology in literature and art.

As director, Weygandt not only modernized the structure of the Friedrichsberg facility, but also transformed it into a prestigious research institute with psychological, brain anatomical, serological and hereditary biological laboratories. His collections of skulls and brains, as well as works of art, drawings and sculptures of the mentally ill also became famous. He provided the clinic with all medical, surgical, curative education and occupational therapy options and was one of the first in Germany to apply malaria therapy according to Julius Wagner-Jauregg .

But Weygandt was also a staunch advocate of racial hygiene . Since he assumed that two thirds of mental illnesses were caused by hereditary problems, he advocated as early as 1904 to prevent the reproduction of those with such stress through marriage bans or sterilization . In 1913 he considered the “theoretical right to exist” of the “born criminal” type and called for criminals who had recidivists to be detained for life and “inferior” to be sterilized or castrated. In 1928 he asserted that Germany could only exist “as a country of quality work, but this includes people who are psychologically bred to the highest level of productivity, whose psyche must be as free as possible from inferiority of disposition and harmful exogenous factors.” At the same time, he doubted “[ o] b it will be possible in Germany to sacrifice the weak sentimentality of unlimited consideration for individual wellbeing and general, superficial hedonism for rational, racial reasons. ”Weygandt feared a“ degeneration ”of society. He saw such a thing in modern art. The “crazy art” he collected served him as evidence that Expressionism , Futurism , Dadaism and Bauhaus art were just as degenerate as the art of the mentally ill.

Accordingly, Weygandt not only welcomed the racial hygiene legislation of National Socialism such as the law for the prevention of hereditary offspring of July 14, 1933, through which forced sterilization was made possible. He also advocated a considerable expansion of the group of people to be sterilized, in which he wanted to include all auxiliary students, welfare pupils and delinquent young people. He also advocated castration and as early as 1933 considered euthanasia of “idiots”. Wilhelm Weygandt's work is thus a particularly striking example of how biologism and racial hygiene increasingly determined psychiatric thinking and acting in the first third of the 20th century.

Honors

In 1960 Weygandtstrasse in Hamburg-Langenhorn was named after him. In 1999, however, it was rededicated due to Weygandt's Nazi burden and now commemorates Friedrich Weygandt († 1525, personality of the German Peasants' War ).

Publications

• Origin of dreams . Leipzig: pressure from Grübel & Sommerlatte, 1893.
• About the mixed states of manic-depressive insanity. A contribution to clinical psychiatry . Munich: Lehmann, 1899.
• The treatment of idiotic and imbeciller children from a medical and educational point of view . Würzburg: A. Stuber, 1900.
• Atlas and ground plan of psychiatry. Munich: Lehmann, 1902. archive.org
• The current state of the doctrine of cretinism . Hall a. S .: Marhold, 1904.
• Further contributions to the doctrine of cretinism. In: Negotiations of the Physical and Medical Society of Würzburg. New series XXXVII, 1905, p. 13.
• Slightly abnormal children . Hall aS: Marhold, 1905.
• Fairy tale. Game in 2 acts. Würzburg, [approx. 1905]
• About idiocy. Presentation given at the annual meeting of the German Association for Psychiatry, Dresden, April 28, 1905. Halle: Marhold, 1906.
• The abnormal characters in Ibsen. Wiesbaden: Bergmann, 1907.
• Forensic psychiatry . Leipzig: Göschen, 1908–1922.
• Abnormal characters in dramatic literature. Shakespeare, Goethe, Ibsen, Gerhart Hauptmann . Hamburg et al: Voss, 1910.
• Manual of Psychiatry. Special Part, Dept. 2, No. 2: Idiocy and Imbecility. The group of defective states of childhood. 1915.
• Psychiatric expert work during the war. In: Annual courses for advanced medical training. May 1917, pp. 22-79.
• On the psychology and psychopathology of the warring peoples (based on a lecture at the end of 1916) . Leipzig: Voss, 1917.
• Detection of the mental disorders. (Psychiatric diagnostics) . Munich: Lehmann, 1920.
• Friedrichsberg: State hospital and psychiatric university clinic in Hamburg. A contribution to hospital treatment and care for the mentally ill and nervous . Hamburg: Meißner, 1922.
• From the Alps to Atlantis. Hamburg: Meissner, 1925.
• Psychology and psychiatry. In: The tasks of psychology at German universities. (1932), pp. 66-68.
• The adolescent nonsense, its recognition, treatment and eradication. Stuttgart 1936.
• Talented morons and their inheritance legal significance. In: Münchner Medizinische Wochenschrift. Volume 85, Issue 1 and No. 2, 1938, pp. 12-16, 61-64.
• Textbook of Nervous and Mental Diseases. Halle a, p. 1935; 2. new. 1952 edition.
• The juvenile bullshit . Stuttgart: Enke, 1936.

literature

• Friedrich Meggendorfer : Wilhelm Weygandt †. In: German journal for neurology. Volume 149, 1939, ISSN  0367-004X , pp. 1-6, doi: 10.1007 / BF01798370 .
• Hans Bürger-Prinz : Wilhelm Weygandt †. In: Journal for the whole of neurology and psychiatry. Volume 166, 1939, pp. 1-3, doi: 10.1007 / BF02896068 .
• Friedrich Meggendorfer: Wilhelm Weygandt †. In: General journal for psychiatry. Volume 114, 1940, ISSN  0303-4194 , pp. 140-163.
• Hendrik van den Bussche (ed.): Medical science in the "Third Reich". Continuity, adaptation and opposition at the Hamburg Medical Faculty (= Hamburg Contributions to the History of Science. Volume 5). Reimer, Berlin et al. 1989, ISBN 3-496-00477-0 .
• Paul Probst: Eugenics as Social Intervention to Prevent Mental Disorders. The Psychiatrist and Psychologist Wilhelm Weygandt (1870-1939). In: Helio Carpintero, Enrique Lafuente, Régine Plas, Lothar Sprung (eds.): New Studies in the History of Psychology and the Social Sciences. Proceedings of the Tenth Meeting of Cheiron, European Society for the Behavioral and Social Sciences , Madrid, September 1991. Revista de Historia de la Psicologia. Valencia 1992, pp. 185-191.
• Elisabeth Weber-Jasper: Wilhelm Weygandt. (1870-1939). Psychiatry between epistemological idealism and racial hygiene (= treatises on the history of medicine and the natural sciences. H. 76). Matthiesen, Husum 1996, ISBN 3-7868-4076-8 (also: Berlin, Free University, dissertation).
• Kai Sammet: “Full-fledged norm”, “cripple of mind” and the self-insurance of the Wilhelmine man: Willhelm Weygandt (1870–1939) and the “youthful nonsense” 1898–1939. In: Gudrun Wolfschmidt (Hrsg.): Hamburg's history with a difference - development of natural sciences, medicine and technology (= Nuncius Hamburgensis Volume 2). Part 1. Books on Demand, Norderstedt 2007, ISBN 978-3-8334-7088-2 , pp. 303-318.
• Kai Sammet: Weygandt, Wilhelm. In: Hamburgische Biografie , Volume 3, ed. by Franklin Kopitzsch and Dirk Brietzke . Wallstein, Göttingen 2006, ISBN 3-8353-0081-4 , pp. 406-408.

Web links

• Literature by and about Wilhelm Weygandt in the catalog of the German National Library
• Newspaper article about Wilhelm Weygandt in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Gerhardt Nissen : Early contributions from Würzburg on the development of child and adolescent psychiatry. In: Peter Baumgart (Ed.): Four hundred years of the University of Würzburg. A commemorative publication. Degener & Co. (Gerhard Gessner), Neustadt an der Aisch 1982 (= sources and contributions to the history of the University of Würzburg. Volume 6), ISBN 3-7686-9062-8 , pp. 935–949; here: p. 937.
2. ↑ Christian von Deuster: From the beginnings of ear, nose and throat medicine in Würzburg. In: Peter Baumgart (Ed.): Four hundred years of the University of Würzburg. A commemorative publication. Degener & Co. (Gerhard Gessner), Neustadt an der Aisch 1982 (= sources and contributions to the history of the University of Würzburg. Volume 6), ISBN 3-7686-9062-8 , pp. 871–890; here: p. 885.
3. ↑ Quoted from Elisabeth Weber-Jasper: Wilhelm Weygandt. (1870-1939). Psychiatry between epistemological idealism and racial hygiene. Husum 1996, p. 14.
4. ^ Christian Mürner : Media and cultural history of people with disabilities: lust for sensation and self-determination . Berlin 2003, p. 73.
5. ↑ Hendrik van den Bussche: Academic careers in the "Third Reich". In the S. (Ed.): Medical Science in the 'Third Reich' - Continuity, Adaptation and Opposition at the Hamburg Medical Faculty. Berlin 1989, pp. 63–117, here: p. 60.
6. ^ Elisabeth Weber-Jasper: Wilhelm Weygandt. (1870-1939). Psychiatry between epistemological idealism and racial hygiene. Husum 1996, pp. 16-19.
7. ^ History of the clinic. From the Middle Ages to the first insane asylum in Hamburg ( memento of the original from November 30, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on www.uke.de 
8. ↑ Georg Rüschemeyer: If my grandmother had wheels. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. June 21, 2009, No. 25, p. 50 (online)
9. ↑ List of publications in: Elisabeth Weber-Jasper: Wilhelm Weygandt. (1870-1939). Psychiatry between epistemological idealism and racial hygiene. Husum 1996, pp. 281-327.
10. ^ Weber-Jasper: Wilhelm Weygandt. Pp. 237-41.
11. ^ Wilhelm Weygandt: About the psychology of the criminal. Lecture from the academic summer courses in Hamburg, summer 1913. In: Messages from the Hamburg State Hospitals. Volume 14, 1914, pp. 211-252.
12. ^ Wilhelm Weygandt: Security, healing and prevention as tasks of modern psychiatry. In: German Medical Weekly . Volume 54, 1928, pp. 1533-1535, cited, p. 1535.
13. ^ Elisabeth Weber-Jasper: Wilhelm Weygandt. (1870-1939). Psychiatry between epistemological idealism and racial hygiene. Husum 1996, pp. 217-222; Marieluise Matzel: “Insanity” in Art - Public Discussion on the Psychopathologization of Fine Art (1910–1925) . Diss. Med. Hamburg 2008, pp. 79-84.
14. ^ Wilhelm Weygandt: Sterilization and castration as a means of racial elevation. In: Münchner Medizinische Wochenschrift . Volume 80, 1933, pp. 1275-1279. Cf. Rolf Castell: History of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in Germany from 1937 to 1961 . Göttingen 2003, pp. 340–341.
15. ↑ Wilhelm Weygandt in the database of the Nazi been present Hamburg, State Center for Political Education Hamburg