Joseph Guislain (

Ghent Ghent ( ; ; historically known as ''Gaunt'' in English) is a City status in Belgium, city and a Municipalities of Belgium, municipality in the Flemish Region of Belgium. It is the capital and largest city of the Provinces of Belgium, province ...

, 2 February 1797 – Ghent, 1 April 1860) was a Belgian physician and a pioneer in

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. ...

Education

Guislain started his medical studies at Ecole de Médicine and he was one of the first students to the

University of Ghent Ghent University (, abbreviated as UGent) is a Public university, public research university located in Ghent, in the East Flanders province of Belgium. Located in Flanders, Ghent University is the second largest Belgian university, consisting o ...

; he graduated as a medical doctor in 1819.

Career

In 1828 Guislain became head of the psychiatric hospitals of Ghent, for which he wrote a new internal regulation together with Petrus Josef Triest. It was the first of its type and stipulated how to handle the patients in a decent and therapeutically justified way. In 1850, together with Edouard Ducpétiaux, he was at the basis of the law on psychiatric care, which would remain the framework for psychiatric care in Belgium until 1991. Joseph Guislain published his ''Traité sur les phrénopathies'' in 1833, in which he proposed a new form of psychiatric classification. He argued that although mental illnesses could take many forms they were all derived from the same single disease process. This gave rise to the psychiatric doctrine of

unitary psychosis Unitary psychosis (''Einheitspsychose'') refers to the 19th-century belief prevalent in German psychiatry until the era of Emil Kraepelin that all forms of psychosis were surface variations of a single underlying disease process. According to this ...

which was highly influential in German psychiatry from the mid-nineteenth century. In his three-volume work ''Leçons orales sur les phrénopathies'' of 1852 he further expanded his vision on mental illness. In 1835, he was appointed as professor in

physiology Physiology (; ) is the science, scientific study of function (biology), functions and mechanism (biology), mechanisms in a life, living system. As a branches of science, subdiscipline of biology, physiology focuses on how organisms, organ syst ...

at the University of Ghent. In 1848, he became a member of the governing board of the new moderate Liberal Association, put himself up as a candidate for the municipality Council elections and was elected. Three years later he was re-elected for a second period of three years, but in 1854 he made an end to his political career. In 1852, the municipality Council of Ghent accepted his plans for a new psychiatric hospital and in 1857 the Guislain Institute was inaugurated. After he died on 1 April 1860 in Ghent he was interred at the Campo Sancto in Sint Amandsberg. In 1887, a statue for him was inaugurated at the Begijnhoflaan in Ghent. File:MuseumDrGuislain 7-10-2009 14-03-59.jpg, File:Gent Bloemekenswijk 005 Guislain.JPG,

References

Sources

Joseph Guislain
(Liberal Archive) (link not found)

External links

Museum Dr. Guislain

Some places and memories related to Joseph Guislain

P.C. Dr. Guislain psychiatric hospital
{{DEFAULTSORT:Guislain, Joseph 1797 births 1860 deaths Belgian psychiatrists Ghent University alumni 19th-century Dutch physicians