Étienne-Jean Georget


Étienne-Jean Georget was a French psychiatrist. He is known for writing on monomania. He is also the pioneer of forensic psychiatry, and was the first psychiatrist to discuss the defence of insanity to criminal charges.

Biography

Georget was born in Vernou-sur-Brenne, into a poor farming family. He was poorly educated, which he felt handicapped his career.
He studied medicine in Tours, then in Paris where he was a student of Philippe Pinel and Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol. From 1815 he worked at the Salpêtrière hospital. In 1820 he attained fame with his book De la folie.
Georget specialized in psychopathology. He refined and clarified Pinel's nosology of mental illnesses. He distinguished several types of monomania such as "theomania", "erotomania", "demonomania" and "homicidal monomania". He also held the view that it is possible for criminals to be held legally responsible for their crimes by reason of insanity.
Georget ridiculed the idea of the uterine origin of hysteria and maintained that it was a disease of men as well as women.
He was a member of the Académie Nationale de Médecine and of the Medical Society of London.
The theoretical work of Georget was influential in establishing the view that 19th century writers of romantic fiction took of the insane and of criminals.
Georget died of pulmonary tuberculosis at the age of 33.

The Géricault portraits

In the early 1820s, he commissioned Théodore Géricault, a former patient, to paint a series of portraits so that his students could study the facial traits of "monomaniacs", as he preferred using such images to having patients in the classroom. Between 1821 and 1824, Géricault created ten paintings, of which five have survived. They include those of a kidnapper, a gambling addict, and a woman "consumed with envy". The most famous is Portrait of a kleptomaniac.

Works

Books

A more complete list can be found in Semelaigne.

Dictionary articles (selection)