Étienne-Jean Georget
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Étienne-Jean Georget (1795 – 1828) was a French psychiatrist who was a native of Vernou-sur-Brenne, department Indre-et-Loire, best-known as the patron of the monomanies series by Géricault.
He studied medicine in Tours and Paris, and afterwards worked at the Salpêtrière. In Paris he was a student and assistant to Philippe Pinel and Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol.
Georget specialized in the study of psychopathology, and made improvements to Pinel's nosology of mental illnesses. He classified several types of monomania by names such as "theomania" (religious obsession), "erotomania" (sexual obsession), "demonomania" (obsession with evil) and "homicidal monomania", which dealt with senseless murder.
In the early 1820s he commissioned painter Théodore Géricault to paint a series of portraits of mental patients so that his students could study the facial traits of "monomaniacs". Between 1821 and 1824 Géricault created ten paintings of mental patients, including those of a kidnapper, a kleptomaniac (see Portrait of a Kleptomaniac), a gambling addict and a woman "consumed with envy".
Works
- De la folie. Considerations sur cette maladie. (1820)
- De la Physiologie du système nerveux (1821)
- Examen médical des procès criminels des nommés Léger, Feldtmann, Lecouffe, Jean-Pierre et Papavoine, dans lesquels l'aliénation mentale a été alléguée comme moyen de défense, suivi de quelques considérations médico-légales sur la liberté morale (1825)
- Discussion médico-légale sur la folie ou alienation mentale (1826)
