Étienne-Jean Georget

Étienne-Jean Georget (2 April 1795 – 14 May 1828 ) was a French psychiatrist. He is known for writing on monomania. He is also the pioneer of forensic psychiatry, and was the first psychiatrist to discuss the defence of insanity to criminal charges.

Biography Georget was born in Vernou-sur-Brenne (Indre-et-Loire), into a poor farming family. He was poorly educated, which he felt handicapped his career.

He studied medicine in Tours, then in Paris where he was a student of Philippe Pinel and Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol. From 1815 he worked at the Salpêtrière hospital.

Georget ridiculed the idea of the uterine origin of hysteria and maintained that it was a disease of men as well as women.

He was a member of the Académie Nationale de Médecine and of the Medical Society of London.

The theoretical work of Georget was influential in establishing the view that 19th century writers of romantic fiction took of the insane and of criminals.

Georget died of pulmonary tuberculosis at the age of 33.

The Géricault portraits In the early 1820s, he commissioned Théodore Géricault, a former patient, to paint a series of portraits so that his students could study the facial traits of "monomaniacs", as he preferred using such images to having patients in the classroom. Between 1821 and 1824, Géricault created ten paintings, of which five have survived. a gambling addict, and a woman "consumed with envy". The most famous is Portrait of a kleptomaniac.

Works

Books (1820) (On insanity) Postel, Jacques (ed.). De la folie. Toulouse: Privat (1972) De la physiologie du système nerveux et spécialement du cerveau: recherches sur les maladies nerveuses en général, et en particulier sur le siége , la nature et le traitement de lʹhystérie, de lʹhypochondrie, de l'épilepsie et de lʹasthme convulsif (1821) Volume 1 on Google Books (1825) Discussion médico-légale sur la folie ou aliénation mentale, suivie de l'examen du procès criminel d'Henriette Cornier, et de plusieurs autres procès dans lesquels cette maladie a été alléguée comme moyen de défense on Gallica (1826) Des maladies mentales, considérées dans leurs rapports avec la législation civile et criminelle (1827) (On mental diseases, considered in relation with civil and criminal laws) (1828) (New forensic discussion on insanity or mental alienation, followed by an examination of a number of criminal trials where that disease was used as a means of defense)

A more complete list can be found in Semelaigne.

Dictionary articles (selection) Articles in Adelon, Nicolas Philibert (ed.). Dictionnaire de médecine. Paris: Béchet jeune: "Délire"; "Folie"; "Hystérie"; "Névrose"