Pinel, Philippe (1745–1826)

One of the founders of modern psychiatry

Philippe Pinel is considered by many to be the father of modern psychiatry. After the French Revolution, he was appointed physician to the infirmaries at the Bicetre Hospital, which at that time housed 4,000 criminals, pensioners, and the sick, including many with syphilis. Pinel focused his attention on the ward housing 200 mentally ill men where he instituted a strict nonviolent, nonmedical management of patients that became known as “moral treatment.” Although he gave due credit to his mentor, Jean Baptiste Pussin (1745–1811), who had freed patients from their shackles and invented the straightjacket, it was Pinel who was credited for the improved management of the mentally ill. After he moved to the Salpêtrière Hospital, he worked to assure that the shackles were removed from patients there. Pinel also put an end to the bleeding, purging, and blistering “therapeutic” interventions for the mentally ill. He focused his energies on careful diagnosis developed through close contact, observation, and extensive conversations with patients. He kept careful notes on his patients, which served as the basis of his book, Traité medicophilosphique sur l'alienation mentale; ou la manie (1801), translated in English as Treatise on Insanity (1806). In 1795, he was appointed to the chair of medical pathology, which he held for 20 years, and was also named chief physician of the Salpêtrière, which he kept until his death.

Pinel created an inoculation clinic at the Salpetriere, where the first vaccination was given in Paris in 1800. In 1798, he published Nosographie philosophique ou methode de l'analyse appliquée à la médicine, which was, for the time, an authoritative classification of diseases. He was elected to the French Académie des Sciences in 1804 and to the Académie de Médicine in 1820. His treatise on mental illness has had a long lasting influence on French, English, and American psychiatry. He has been immortalized in [Page 1252]paintings, prints, and by a statue situated outside the Salpetriere.