100 years ago – Psychopharmacotherapy in Emil Kraepelin's Psychiatric Textbook of 1909

One hunderd years ago Emil Kraepelin, at that time director of the Psychiatric Clinic of the University of Munich, published the first volume – entitled „general psychiatry“– of the eighth edition of his famous textbook. For at least two generations of psychiatrists this 1909 edition of Kraepelin's „Psychiatrie“ became the most important guideline for the scientific understanding of psychiatric disorders. Due to the so-called „therapeutic nihilism“ of this era, however, therapeutic measures, especially pharmacotherapy, comprise only a minor part of Kraepelin's considerations. Nevertheless, the analysis of Kraepelin's pharmacotherapeutic recommendations delivers interesting insights into the historical development of psychiatry and psychopharmacology. While opium alkaloids and aldehyde narcotics were the most common drugs in everyday clinical psychiatry about 1900, the explanatory power of the theoretical models for psychoactive drugs remained weak. Although Kraepelin's interest in pharmacotherapy can be interpreted as a result of his pharmacopsychologic studies since the 1880s, for Kraepelin and his contemporaries the idea of a genuine curative psychopharmacology was inconceivable.