Paul Julius Möbius
Paul Julius Möbius ( born January 24, 1853 in Leipzig, † January 8, 1907 ) was a German neurologist, psychiatrist and science journalist.
Life
Möbius was a grandson of the mathematician August Ferdinand Möbius. After visiting the St. Thomas School in Leipzig, he studied theology and philosophy in 1870 and 1873 and medicine in Leipzig, Jena and Marburg. He received a doctorate in phil. (1873 ) and MD (1877 ).
In 1878 he settled first as a neurologist and electrical therapist in Leipzig privately down. In parallel he worked from 1882 as a volunteer and in 1883 as an assistant at the nerve -budgetary department of the Medical Policlinic of the University of Leipzig under Wilhelm Erb and Adolf von Strümpell.
In 1883 he habilitated and thus acquired the teaching qualification at the University of Leipzig. After Möbius had been passed over several times in the appointment of professors and the Directorate of Medical Polyclinic, he was under loud protests back in 1893 his habilitation and was confined to his private practice.
From 1886 he was the " Schmidt yearbooks for the whole medicine " out and rose to become one of the most influential critics of the medical press.
Work
Even today, much of science and historical value are his work on the psychogenesis of mental and nervous diseases, among other things, to hysteria. He postulated is the first time for the German -speaking psychological causes of disease. Therefore, and because he convincingly turned out the suggestive healing effect of electrotherapy, Sigmund Freud Möbius designated as one of the fathers of psychotherapy.
Another lasting merit is to have given his friend, the psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin, important suggestions for differentiation and systematization of mental illness. Mobius had made a unique based on the assumed of him causes of disease classification of nervous diseases and mental illnesses. Its division into endogenous and exogenous disturbances remained for a long time and both influence for Psychiatry and Neurology of the 20th century. Endogenous disturbances, ie, founded on the nervous system itself, but he declined to degenerative effects of degeneracy. In the long term also pioneered Möbius paving the way for negative eugenics and the crimes of psychologically and mentally ill person under National Socialism. In addition, the Moebius syndrome bears his name, which he first described in 1888, and he pointed the way to the detection of endocrine cause of Graves' disease.
Doubtful fame Möbius acquired through his pamphlet "On the physiological feeblemindedness of the woman " (Hall: Marhold 1900). The core message of the work posits this " idiocy of the woman ," not only, but also tries to demonstrate this with even then dubious methods. Moreover, he claims that the bullshit is one of the conservation of man serving positive characteristic and therefore necessarily follows from the evolution of man. Möbius received much acclaim, provoked with this document but also refutations, as the anti-feminists (1902 ) by Hedwig Dohm. As a further response to Mobius appeared in 1902 the work of the woman and the Intellectualismus of Oda Mount of Olives and 1903 the font feminism and science of Johanna Elberskirchen. Elberskirchen ruled: ". Fact is that the scholars are against the woman, in their judgment too male and too little or not at all scientifically passing judgment " In other writings ( such as gender and head size ) tried Möbius to substantiate his thesis - and thus demonstrating simultaneously in comments be brain anatomical and physiological brain incomprehension. "On the physiological idiocy of the woman " saw eight editions during his lifetime; in the later editions of Möbius received letters on with which he had received for and against the book of women and men. These letters made at the end of almost half of the book.
In Joshua Sobol's play Weininger's Night Moebius occurs as a persecutor of the philosopher Otto Weininger, whom he accused of plagiarism.