Johann Christian Reil

Johann Christian Reil (20 February 1759, Rhaude (an urban destrict of Rhauderfehn) – 22 November 1813, Halle an der Saale) was a German physician, physiologist, anatomist, and psychiatrist. He coined the term psychiatry–Psychiatrie in German–in 1808.

Medical conditions and anatomical features named after him include Reil's finger and the Islands of Reil in the cerebral cortex. In 1809, he was the first to describe the white fibre tract now called the arcuate fasciculus and the locus coeruleus.

From 1788 to 1810 he worked in a hospital in Halle, Germany. In 1795 Reil established the very first journal of physiology in German, the Archiv für die Physiologie. In 1810 he became one of the first university teachers of psychiatry when appointed professor of medicine in Berlin.

From 1802-1805 the poet Goethe visited Reil to discuss scientific matters such as psychiatry and to access his skills as a physician.

Reil used the term 'psychiaterie' in a short-lived journal he set up with J.C. Hoffbauer, Beytrage zur Beforderung einer Curmethode auf psychischem Wege (1808: 169). He argued there should not just be a branch of medicine (psychische Medizin) or of theology or penal practice, but a discipline in its own right with trained practitioners. He also sought to publicize the plight of the insane in the asylums, and to develop a 'psychical' method of treatment, consistent with the moral treatment movement of the times. He was critical of Frenchman Philippe Pinel, however. Reil was mainly theoretical, with little direct clinical experience, by contrast with Pinel. Reil is considered a writer within the German Romantic context and his 1803 work Rhapsodien uber die Anwendung der psychischen Kurmethode auf Geisteszerrüttungen ('Rhapsodies about applying the psychological method of treatment to mental breakdowns') has been called the most important document of Romantic psychiatry. Reil didn't conceptualize madness as just a break from reason but as a reflection of wider social conditions, and believed that advances in civilization created more madness. He saw this as due not to physical lesions in the brain or to hereditary evil, but as a disturbance in the harmony of the mind's functions (forms of awareness or presence), rooted in the nervous system.

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