Two Faces of Emil Kraepelin

Abstract

Eponymous lecturers are expected to make some reference to the person in whose name the lecture is being delivered. In this case my task has been facilitated by the fact that the first Mapother lecture was devoted to Edward Mapother himself. It was given by his successor, Sir Aubrey Lewis, who, as was his wont, furnished a comprehensive account of his subject, demonstrating how this remarkable man laid the foundations of the institution to which he devoted his professional life. Lewis's lecture, entitled “Edward Mapother and the Making of the Maudsley Hospital” (Lewis, 1969), provides a link with this one via the mention of the visit paid by Frederick Mott in 1909 to Emil Kraepelin's Forschungsanstalt in Munich, where he was so impressed by what he saw that he resolved to use Henry Maudsley's bequest to found a corresponding institution in this country. Edward Mapother was to assume a major responsibility for this large enterprise which he justified as follows: “The only hope for the sort of dispassionate long-term research which psychiatry needs, is the creation of teams of career investigators … most of whom should not be primarily psychiatrists at all, but real experts in various branches of science, who have brought its technique to the service of psychiatry and then received enough training in this to enable them to see its problems … Then we should get progress, not pot-boiling.”