Review article

Neuropsychopharmacology and the genetics of schizophrenia

A history of the diagnosis of schizophrenia

Thomas A. Ban

Department of Psychiatry, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA

Accepted 10 May 2004 - Available online 25 July 2004

1. Introduction

The observation that mental illness runs in families has been documented since the mid-18th century. Battie (1758) noted that some of his mad patients had lunatic ancestors. Esquirol (1838) concluded that heredity is the commonest cause of insanity (Shorter, 1997).

The first theory about the role of heredity in mental illness was proposed by Morel (1857). He postulated that insanity is the result of an innate biological defect, and the severity of mental syndromes increases in lineal descents. Morel's (1857) theory of degeneration remained mainstream psychiatry for several decades. Its proponents included Krafft-Ebing (1868) in Austria, Maudsley (1870) in England, Magnan and Legrain (1895) in France, and many others (Shorter, 1997).