Introduction

In the imaginations of many observers prior to World War I, the psychiatric clinic in Munich epitomized the professional ideals of psychiatric training and research. Inaugurated in 1904, it quickly gained a reputation as a model institution and became a shrine on the pilgrimage of numerous American and European psychiatrists in search of professional edification. The clinic's reputation was derived in good part from the prestige of its first director, Emil Kraepelin (1856–1926). By the turn of the century, Kraepelin was fast becoming Germany's foremost clinical psychiatrist, internationally renowned for his classification of endogenous psychoses.

Kraepelin's enormous influence on psychiatric classification has had a profound impact on his historical legacy. Advocates and detractors alike have been inclined to debate his significance above all within nosological parameters. The resulting historiography has shown a decided predilection for psychiatric concepts. Indeed, Kraepelin's legacy has in some respects come to be held hostage to an historiographic preoccupation with the origins and implications of his psychiatric nosology. Deserved or not, the attention given to his classification of mental disorders has tended to eclipse other important facets of his work—facets that proved crucial to the profession's development in the twentieth century and that are as pertinent to psychiatric research today as they were a century ago. This article looks beneath Kraepelin's nosology to consider another aspect of his work that, if one purviews the literature, has rarely become the object of historical inquiry.