Emil Kraepelin, Professor of Psychiatry at Heidelberg from 1891~1903 described the disease construct of "Dementia praecox" for the first time(kraepelin 1896) and defined it by definite but partly variable characteristics of symptomatology and
course.
The concept of schizophrenia is still based on them.
It is also to kraepelin's merit to have stimulated the epidemiological, genetic and experimental research on the psychopathology and neuropathology of schizophrenia.
According to his psychiatric textbook, psychiatry is the science of psychiatric illness & its treatment. Through the precise clinical observation we can build comprehensive and true clinical pictures of psychiatric illnesses.
Collection of the new facts about the psychiatric patients and the accumulation of clinical experiences help to build up complete disease process.
From this variety of clinical information we can classify & categorize them into identical disease unit due to the commonness of the regular clinical processes & pictures. However classification of the psychiatric illness has many difficulties in
psychiatry because there are many mixed and transient clinical forms.
As seen in presbyophrenia, alcoholism and Korsakov psychosis same psychiatric disorder can be developed from variable causes and at the same time from the idenical causes different illness can be developed.
Classification and diagnosis of psychiatric illness should utilize the know ledge of pathology, anatomy, individual psychology and clinical experiences and disease process & clinical result would be helpful.
Thanks to the consistent observation of the courses of mental disorders Kraepelin finally succeeded in replacing a terminology that had become chaotic.
His two groups of disease gave precise form to the differentiation between "emotional" and "mental" disorders of the beginning of the nineteenth century. This appeared in the sixth edition of this textbook of 1899, after the term " dementia
praecox"
adopted by Kraepelin in 1893, had acquired comparehensive significance.
The psychiatric systematology of the twentieth century is that of kraepelin, even though the principle from which he derived his classification may have been oriented to a phantom. Kraepelin sought and found disease entities. These were clinical
entities, derived from course observation in kahlbaum's sense and in the sense of French psychiatry.
Today, Kraepelin's guiding thought is reflected not only in the method of course observation, but also and particularly in exclusion criteria such as certain age limits.
The mutual exclusiveness of the two idiopathic group, and the required absence of any organic disorder, as well as in the endeavors toward validation in terms of a differential reaction to somatic therapy and a specific family pattern of
distribution.
The dynamic derailments would corespond to the primary mental disorders of pre-Kraepelin psychiatry, regarded as affective and reversible, but capable of progressing to secondary conditions of debilitation that are no longer reversible. From the
stand
point of Krapelin's disease model, this earlier conception was referred to in retrospect as the theory of unitary psychosis(Einheitspsychose).
The essence of his method of research was the study of the complete life history of the psychiatric patients above and beyond the notation of current psychopathological signs and symptoms.
His classification is composed of a four-level dichotomy in the areas of terminology, nosology, clinical descriptive boundaries, and prognosis.
In conceptual terms Kraepelin as well as kahlbaum assumed that the disease entities had a biological foundation based on the idea of uniformity in terms of causes, symptoms, course, and outcome.
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