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Karl Ludwig Kahlbaum (1828-1899)
Arnab Bhattacharya
Karl Ludwig Kahlbaum was born in 1828 in Dierschau, Eastern Germany. His parents owned a freight transport company. They provided him with the opportunity to study medicine, basic sciences, and mathematics. Beyond this, he was interested in botany, zoology, and anthropology.
He studied medicine at the universities of Königsberg, Würzburg, and Leipzig and received his medical degree in Berlin. Kahlbaum provided the basis for the modern conceptualisation of mental illness, based on the essential features (symptom patterns) and associated features (age at onset, course, family history, and outcome).
Kahlbaum was the originator of what later became known as the Bonhoeffer paradigm. He observed that identical or similar clinical pictures do not necessarily share the same aetiology and that their course and outcome may be completely different from each other.
He expanded psychiatric terminology by coining terms for newly described symptoms and syndromes. Among those are the terms paraphrenia, dysthymia, cyclothymia, and hebephrenia. In 1871, Kahlbaum encouraged his pupil and friend, Ewald Hecker, to publish on the concept of hebephrenia.
His most famous work is Catatonia or Tension Insanity, which he wrote in 1874 and which was not translated into English until 1973.
Acknowledgement Braunig, P., Kruger, S. (1999) American Journal of Psychiatry, 156,7,989
Author is Postgraduate Trainee of Psychiatry at Silchar Medical College and Hospital, Silchar.
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