Classic Text No. 77 `Hebephrenia. A contribution to clinical psychiatry' by Dr. Ewald Hecker in Goerlitz (1871)

• Published in: History of psychiatry Vol. 20; no. 1; pp. 87 - 106
• Main Author: Kraam, Abdullah
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 01-03-2009
• ISSN: 0957-154X; 1740-2360
• DOI: 10.1177/0957154X08099416

When Kahlbaum reluctantly allowed his disciple Hecker to write the paper on hebephrenia no one could foresee that it would be one of the few psychiatric concepts that would still be relevant today, for three reasons. First, it is still included in major current psychiatric classification systems. Second, some authors believe that it signifies a particularly malignant form of schizophrenia with an early onset and poor prognosis. Third, its introduction coincided with increased interest in age of onset of psychiatric disorders and proved to be a sensitive marker for the emergence of child psychiatry as a specialty. Until now, only excerpts of Hecker's seminal paper have been available in English; this is the first complete translation including all case reports and letters.The seven cases and accompanying letters formed a crucial part of Hecker's paper. Readers can now, for the first time, judge for themselves why it had such a tremendous impact beyond nineteenth-century German psychiatry.