Heinrich Philipp August Damerow

Heinrich Philipp August Damerow ( born December 28, 1798 in Stettin, † September 22, 1866 in Halle ( Saale) ) was a German physician.

Life and work

Damerow was - like many of his colleagues - the son of a pastor and grew up with his mother in the " widow house preacher " of the Szczecin Johannis monastery because his father already died early. By this imprint he came in youth in contact with there also supplied the mentally ill. In 1817 he was a high school and graduated in the same year in Berlin. At Ernst Horn, a student of Johann C. Reil, and Karl Georg Neumann, a successor horn, he heard psychiatry at the Charité. In Friedrich Schleiermacher and Georg WF Hegel especially when he studied philosophy. He received his doctorate in 1821, habilitation in 1822 in Berlin as a lecturer and was appointed in 1830 as associate professor of medicine at Greifswald. From 1832 he was employed as a confidant of Altenstein the board of trustees for Hospital Affairs and thus responsible for the misleading nature of the Berlin Ministry. Old stone had already been organized in collaboration with Maximilian Jacobi for the Rhine Province, the establishment of a lunatic asylum in Siegburg. 1836 went Damerow as a physician and director of the provisional " misleading Healing Institute " in Halle, then spent several years working in the Medizinalabteilung the Ministry of Culture in Berlin and only returned in 1842 to Halle back to there in 1844 the management of the built according to his plans for the province of Saxony lunatic, medicinal and Pfleganstalt Nietleben to take over at Halle. He died September 22, 1866 in Halle. In 1858 he was elected a member of the Scholars Academy Leopoldina.

With Carl Friedrich Flemming and Christian Friedrich Wilhelm Roller Damerow founded 1844, the General Journal of Psychiatry and psycho- forensic medicine, edited by German alienists in connection with court physicians and Criminalisten (Berlin). She was oriented to the model of the French journal " Annales ". Damerow since 1821 was already in personal contact with Jean -Etienne Esquirol at the Salpêtrière. Also, all founders of the "General Journal" were in close contact with the editors of " Annales ". The appearance of the "General Journal" represented the culmination of the institution Psychiatry; they served at that time the German psychiatry as a rallying point. Damerow, therefore introducing the head of the magazine represents a their chief representative, he saw not only the psychiatric ward of a philosophical and idealistic perspective, but directed them also on the state's authority. From the point of an anthropologically oriented psychiatry he tried to integrate the advent of the still mostly natural philosophy influenced scientific progress in the field of medicine in psychiatric practice. Both Flemming and scooters also understood itself as such somaticist. In his essay on the "relative link " of the institutions themselves Damerow already presented on the book title, inter alia, as "Director of the physico- medical society to Erlangen " and the " natural society inquiring friends to hall " before. As a good patriot, he was also a member of the " Silesian Society for patriotic culture". His success was based not least on the support he owed ​​influential politicians. Among these is next to the Old Stone after 1840, the Prussian Minister of Education Eichorn mentioned. However, in order Damerow got into a contrast to the revolutionary aspirations of the 40s. By Damerow the line of the "General Journal" held, it became a state-supporting organ during the revolutionary period. This reflected not only the legal profession of the doctor for the poor word. The government is also expected on an equal footing, the current political order favorable inclusion of forensic psychiatry. The newspaper did not turn more - as previously used - even on the non-medical public. Dietrich Georg Kieser represented in this journal understandings of the irrationality of the insane, notably the emerging proletariat, how she was already used to. The methods to deal with this foolishness, similar to those in the corresponding institutions as they were about in France at the time of the Hôpital Général in use. Reason went here on the mere concept of order. Education and state power coincided. A similar conception of state-supportive psychiatry represented Karl Wilhelm Ideler. During his era, a medical dissertation entitled " De morbo democratico " was (engl. " The Democrats disease" ) of the Berlin faculty discussed and adopted. - The Ward Nietleben is thus known that there the peer-reviewed Damerow assassin Max Sefeloge was housed, cf. Works (selection). The target of Damerow synthesis with the new somatic concepts came too late. They turned from the somaticist often against the philosophical- anthropological superstructure which favored the more stringent educational concepts of somatotherapy and engaged for one without mechanical constraint (No restraint ) operating value-free psychiatric science as it asked the university psychiatry.

Damerows primary business is based in a significant improvement of the facilities of the asylums in Germany.

Works (selection)

• About the relative connection of the insane, healing and care institutions in historical-critical, such as in moral, scientific and administrative relationship. A state drug scientific treatise. Otto Wigand, Leipzig 1840 can be downloaded from Google Books
• Sefeloge. Insanity trial in connection with the assassination of Max Sefeloge against Frederick William IV. Pepper, Halle, 1853, OCLC 14,844,267th
• To cretins and idiots question. Berlin 1858.
• About the basis of facial expression and physiognomy, as a free contribution to anthropology and psychiatry. Berlin 1860.