Gottlieb Burckhardt, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

    

Gottlieb Burckhardt

Swiss psychiatrist (1836-1907)

Date of Birth: 24-Dec-1836

Place of Birth: Basel, Basel-Stadt, Switzerland

Date of Death: 06-Feb-1907

Profession: psychiatrist, neurosurgeon

Nationality: Switzerland

Zodiac Sign: Capricorn


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About Gottlieb Burckhardt

  • Johann Gottlieb Burckhardt (24 December 1836 – 6 February 1907) was a Swiss psychiatrist and the medical director of a small mental hospital in the Swiss canton of Neuchâtel.
  • He is commonly regarded as having performed the first modern psychosurgical operation.
  • Born in Basel, Switzerland, he trained as doctor at the Universities of Basel, Göttingen and Berlin, receiving his medical doctorate in 1860.
  • In the same year he took up a teaching post in the University of Basel and established a private practice in his hometown.
  • He married in 1863 but the following year he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and gave up his practice and relocated to a region south of the Pyrennes in search of a cure.
  • By 1866 he had made a full recovery and returned to Basel with the intention of devoting himself to the study of nervous diseases and their treatment.
  • In 1875, he attained a post at the Waldau University Psychiatric Clinic in Bern and from 1876 he lectured on mental diseases at the University of Bern.
  • Beginning in this period, he published widely on his psychiatric and neurological research findings in the medical press developing the thesis that mental illnesses had their origins in specific regions of the brain. In 1882 he was appointed the medical director of a small, modern and privately run psychiatric clinic at Marin in the Swiss Canton of Neuchâtel where he was provided with a laboratory to continue his research.
  • In 1888 he pioneered modern psychosurgery when he excised various brain regions from six psychiatric patients under his care.
  • Aimed at relieving symptoms rather than effecting a cure, the theoretical basis of the procedure rested on his belief that psychiatric illnesses were the result of specific brain lesions.
  • He reported the results at a Berlin medical conference in 1889 but the reception of his medical peers was decidedly negative and he was ridiculed.
  • Burckhardt subsequently discontinued his research activities.
  • Following the death of his wife in 1896 Burckhardt returned to Basel where he established a sanatorium in 1900.
  • He died seven years later from pneumonia.

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