Bénédict Morel

Bénédict Augustin Morel (Vienna, 1809 – Rouen, 1873) was a French physician and psychiatrist, born in Vienna to French parents. He is one of the most influential figures in nineteenth-century psychiatry, chiefly for his degeneration theory and for the term démence précoce, a forerunner of the later concept of schizophrenia.

His childhood was marked by hardship, and as a student in Paris he supported himself by teaching English and German. He earned his medical doctorate in 1839 and two years later became an assistant to Jean-Pierre Falret at the Salpêtrière. In 1848 he was appointed director of the Maréville asylum in Nancy, where he pushed for less reliance on physical restraint and studied the family histories of people with intellectual disabilities. In 1856 he took charge of the Saint-Yon asylum in Rouen.

Shaped by the pre-Darwinian ideas of evolution then in circulation, Morel regarded mental deficiency as the final stage of a progressive decline passed down through generations. His 1857 Traité des dégénérescences held that heredity was the root cause, though he later gave weight to alcohol and drugs. In 1860 he used the term démence précoce to describe a disorder beginning in adolescence or early adulthood. His legacy is mixed: his theory fed eugenic thinking, and Freud and Jaspers rejected it, yet he is credited with promoting a biological approach to psychiatry.