Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol

Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol
Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol
Born	3 February 1772 Toulouse, France
Died	12 December 1840(1840-12-12) (aged 68) Paris, France
Nationality	French
Fields	Psychiatry
Institutions	Salpêtrière Hospital
Influences	Philippe Pinel

Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol (3 February 1772 – 12 December 1840) was a French psychiatrist.

Born and raised in Toulouse, Esquirol completed his education at Montpellier. He came to Paris in 1799 where he worked at the Salpêtrière Hospital and became a favorite student of Philippe Pinel.

To enable Esquirol to take up the intensive study of insanity in an appropriate setting, Pinel reportedly put up the security for the house and garden on Rue de Buffon where Esquirol established a maison de santé or private asylum in 1801 or 1802. Esquirol's maison was quite successful, being ranked, in 1810, as one of the three best such institutions in Paris.

In 1805 he published his thesis The passions considered as causes, symptoms and means of cure in cases of insanity. Esquirol, like Pinel, believed that the origin of mental illness could be found in the passions of the soul and was convinced that madness does not fully and irremediably affect a patient's reason.

Esquirol was made médecin ordinaire at the Salpêtrière in 1811, following the death of Jean-Baptiste Pussin, Pinel's trusted concierge. Pinel chose Esquirol because he was, as Pinel put it, "a physician... devoted exclusively to the study of insanity," arguing that with his many years of maison de santé experience he was the only man suited for the job.

Esquirol saw the question of madness as institutional and national. This was especially true for the poor where he saw the state, with the help of doctors, playing an important role. He also saw an important role for doctors in caring for people accused of crimes who were declared not responsible by reason of insanity. In public controversies over this question he promoted the usefulness of the diagnosis of monomania. By taking such an active role in these public matters, his fame eclipsed that of his teacher Pinel.

In 1817, under the restored Bourbon monarchy, Esquirol initiated a course in maladies mentales in the makeshift quarters of the Salpêtrière dining hall. This was perhaps the first formal teaching of psychiatry in France. It was in 1817 that he coined the word hallucination. At this time he was neither a professor at the Paris faculty or the chief physician at a Paris hospital, but merely a médecin ordinaire. Nonetheless he was reported to have been one of the clinical instructors to whose hospital visits "students flock with a kind of frenzy". He had many very distinguished students.