Several Thoughts on Emil Kraepelin’s Biography

Recently, I read a few of classic textbooks of psychiatry and found that the basic architecture age of classification dichotomy of psychiatry proposed by the founder of our modern psychiatry – German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin was probably 40 years or so. Mr. Kraepelin is famous in psychiatry and he is known as the “father of modern psychiatry”, mainly because his proposed psychiatric classification framework and etiology understanding have profoundly affected the classification, diagnostic systems and etiology study of modern psychiatry since 19th century. I believe that there are many precocious scholars in this field, but he has published the research achievement with a far-reaching effect and proposed the corresponding academic viewpoints and become the master in this field when he was very young. Particularly in the aspect of mathematical researches, some researchers have become the worldrenowned masters in their middle twenties. For example, it is said that the famous mathematician Eular born in Swiss in the early 18th century began to publish her research papers in mathematics at the age of eighteen and devoted himself to the mathematical research in the next few decades and made remarkable achievements. However, few clinicians can become a master in certain clinical medicine field shortly after their graduation from a college due to a greater dependence on clinical practice and corresponding accumulated experience in the clinical medicine. It is exactly due to such a understanding that I become interested in the biography and chronicle of Mr. Kraepelin and hope to find the evidences to prove that there were already rich clinical experiences and theoretical bases sufficient to support him to propose the dichotomy taxonomy and corresponding diagnostic concepts, or conversely, find that his clinical experiences in those years are not sufficient to serve as the solid foundation for his classification framework and theoretical bases.