Affiliation:
1. Virginia Institute of Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics, and Department of Psychiatry Medical College of Virginia/Virginia Commonwealth University Richmond Virginia USA
2. Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures University of Toronto Toronto Ontario Canada
Abstract
AbstractOn September 27, 1922, Ernst Rüdin gave an address to the Annual Conference of the German Society of Genetics entitled “Regarding the Heredity of Mental Disturbances.” Published in a 37‐page article, Rüdin reviewed the progress in the field of Mendelian psychiatric genetics, then hardly more than a decade old. Topics included (a) the status of Mendelian analyses of dementia praecox and manic‐depressive insanity which had expanded to include two and three locus and early polygenic models and sometimes included, respectively, schizoid and cyclothymic personalities; (b) a critique of theories for the explanation of co‐occurrence of different psychiatric disorders within families; and (c) a sharp methodologic critique of Davenport and Rosanoff's contemporary work which emphasized Rüdin's commitment to careful, expert phenotyping, a primary focus on well‐validated psychiatric disorders and not broad spectra of putatively inter‐related conditions, and an emphasis on rigorous statistical modeling as seen in his continued collaboration with Wilhelm Weinberg.
Subject
Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience,Psychiatry and Mental health,Genetics (clinical)