Gerhart Zeller

Gerhart Zeller (1922-2006) was a German psychiatrist who trained under Ernst Kretschmer at the University of Tübingen in the 1950s. After 1962 he worked as chief physician at the Landesnervenklinik in Spandau near Berlin. He was responsible for establishing the neuropsychiatric ward in the nearby Hospital Havelhöhe, which he then headed until his retirement. In 1975 he established the patient-aid association Die Brücke, which to this day works to bridge the gap between hospitals and local communities by providing extramural housing and psychosocial services to chronically ill patients. During the 1980s, Zeller was intimately involved in the implementation of reforms to the psychiatric infrastructure in Berlin and was a member of the federal Ministry of Health’s Advisory Board on Psychiatric Reforms.

Eric J. Engstrom is an historian of psychiatry and a research associate in the Department of History at the Humboldt University in Berlin. He received his BA from Lewis and Clark College in Portland, OR, his MA from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, and his Ph.D (in History) from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has published widely in the history of psychiatry, including a monograph on Clinical Psychiatry in Imperial Germany with Cornell University Press. He has been a member of the working group on the “History of Psychiatry” at the Max-Planck-Institute for Psychiatry in Munich, co-editor of the 9 volume edition of Emil Kraepelin’s correspondence, and a lead member of the German Research Foundation (DFG) research group “Cultures of Madness (1870-1930)”. He is currently researching and writing a book on the history of psychiatric governance in Imperial Berlin, 1880-1914.

German E. Berrios is the Emeritus Professor of the Epistemology of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge, and a Life-Fellow at Robinson College. He has published widely on neuropsychiatry and on conceptual and historical aspects of psychopathology. He is the author of numerous books, including a History of Clinical Psychiatry (with Roy Porter) and The History of Mental Symptoms: Descriptive Psychopathology since the 19^th Century. He has been chairman of the History of Psychiatry Section of the World Health Organization, and was founding editor of the journal History of Psychiatry.