Carl Georg Lange (4 December 1834 – 29 May 1900) was a Danish

physician A physician, medical practitioner (British English), medical doctor, or simply doctor is a health professional who practices medicine, which is concerned with promoting, maintaining or restoring health through the Medical education, study, Med ...

who made contributions to the fields of

neurology Neurology (from , "string, nerve" and the suffix wikt:-logia, -logia, "study of") is the branch of specialty (medicine) , medicine dealing with the diagnosis and treatment of all categories of conditions and disease involving the nervous syst ...

psychiatry Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of deleterious mental disorder, mental conditions. These include matters related to cognition, perceptions, Mood (psychology), mood, emotion, and behavior. ...

, and

psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both consciousness, conscious and Unconscious mind, unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feel ...

. Born to a wealthy family in

Vordingborg Vordingborg () is a market town and old ferry town on the south coast of the island of Zealand in Denmark. Because of three large estates surrounding the town, a coherent urban development has not been possible, which is the reason why three sat ...

, Denmark, Lange attended medical school at the

University of Copenhagen The University of Copenhagen (, KU) is a public university, public research university in Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark. Founded in 1479, the University of Copenhagen is the second-oldest university in Scandinavia, after Uppsala University. ...

and graduated in 1859 with a reputation for brilliance. After publishing on the neurological pathologies of

aphasia Aphasia, also known as dysphasia, is an impairment in a person's ability to comprehend or formulate language because of dysfunction in specific brain regions. The major causes are stroke and head trauma; prevalence is hard to determine, but aph ...

, bulbar palsy,

tabes dorsalis Tabes dorsalis is a late consequence of neurosyphilis, characterized by the slow degeneration (specifically, demyelination) of the neural tracts primarily in the Dorsal root ganglion, dorsal root ganglia of the spinal cord (nerve root). These pati ...

, and pathologies of the

spinal cord The spinal cord is a long, thin, tubular structure made up of nervous tissue that extends from the medulla oblongata in the lower brainstem to the lumbar region of the vertebral column (backbone) of vertebrate animals. The center of the spinal c ...

, he achieved world fame with his 1885 work "On Emotions: A Psycho-Physiological Study". In it, he posited that all

emotion Emotions are physical and mental states brought on by neurophysiology, neurophysiological changes, variously associated with thoughts, feelings, behavior, behavioral responses, and a degree of pleasure or suffering, displeasure. There is ...

s are developed from, and can be reduced to, physiological reactions to stimuli. Seemingly independently, the American

William James William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist. The first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States, he is considered to be one of the leading thinkers of the late 19th c ...

had published a similar work the year before, but unlike James, Lange specifically stated that vasomotor changes ''are'' emotions. The theory became known as the James–Lange theory of emotion. In 1886 Lange published "On Periodical Depressions and their Pathogenesis," an exposé on the previously undescribed illness of periodic depressions without mania known today as

major depressive disorder Major depressive disorder (MDD), also known as clinical depression, is a mental disorder characterized by at least two weeks of pervasive depression (mood), low mood, low self-esteem, and anhedonia, loss of interest or pleasure in normally ...

. He asserted that the disease was extremely common in his practice. Based on observations he made of his patients' urine, he hypothesized that the illness was related to an excess of

uric acid Uric acid is a heterocyclic compound of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen with the Chemical formula, formula C5H4N4O3. It forms ions and salts known as urates and acid urates, such as ammonium acid urate. Uric acid is a product of the meta ...

in the blood and advocated for methods of reducing this substance, including the use of

lithium Lithium (from , , ) is a chemical element; it has chemical symbol, symbol Li and atomic number 3. It is a soft, silvery-white alkali metal. Under standard temperature and pressure, standard conditions, it is the least dense metal and the ...

. His recommendations were discarded by the psychiatric community, as was his

nosological Nosology () is the branch of medical science that deals with the Medical classification, classification of diseases. Fully classifying a medical condition requires knowing its cause (and that there is only one cause), the effects it has on the ...

assertions of the uniqueness of the disease. Lithium was later found in 1949 to be an effective treatment for mood disorders, although the concept of a uric acid diathesis was fully discredited. But a connection of uric acid and depression is not without possibility. He died in Copenhagen in 1900 at the age of 65.

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