Because his degree from Toulouse licensed him to practice only in that
town he supported himself for many years giving lessons in mathmatics
and translating medical works. In 1785 he translated William
Cullen's
First Lines in the Practice of Physic. He pursued research
interests in natural history and practiced a little medicine on the sly,
serving as a consultant at the nursing home of Jacques Belhomme (1737-1824),
where some mental patients attracted his attention. He failed twice in
a competition which would have awarded him funds to continue his studies.
In the second competition the jury stressed his ‘painful’ mediocrity in
all areas of medical knowledge, an assessment seemingly so grossly incompatible
with his later intellectual accomplishments that political motives have
been suggested. Discouraged, Pinel considered emigrating to America. In
1784 he became responsible for the review
Gazette de Santé.
He became the friend of Cabanis and Thouret, and a member of the salon of ideologists who met at the house of Madame Helvetius. As far as we know his interest in psychiatry began only in the mid-eighties, when he was forty years old. The revolution, which brought temporary power to many of his friends, also raised the shy and unpretentious Pinel to positions of prominence. In 1793 he was put in charge of the Bicêtre, a public hospice for men near Paris. When he asked for a report on the 200 mentally ill men housed on the seventh ward, he received a table with comments form the 'governor' Jean Baptiste Pussin (1745-1811), who became Pinel's trusted collaborator. Pinel virtually apprenticed himself to Pussin, attempting to 'enrich the medical theory of mental illness with all the insights that the empirical approach affords.' Pinel transfered his interest in natural history from the mental hospital to the mental hospital, attempting to classify patients into 'distinct species.'
In 1794, he was made Professor of Hygiene and, later, of Internal Medicine in the newly-founded School of Medicine. In 1795 Pinel was transfered to the Salpètrière, where he accomplished his famous work of liberation. Among his contemporaries he was known and admired as a physician rather than a psychiatrist. His Nosography, which appeared in 1798, became the bible of the Paris school for twenty years. For us the predominant interest lies of course in his Traité médico-philosophique sur l'Aliénation Mentale which was first published in 1801. During the "purge" of liberalism, which took place in the medical school in 1822, Pinel was forced to retire. After several successive softenings of the brain, Pinel died in a state of advanced dementia on October 25, 1826.
see: Erwin H Ackerknecht, Short
History of Psychiatry, [New York, Hafner publishing, 1968] p.41
see: [Weiner,
1992, 725-6]
see: [Weiner,
1977, 1128-1134]
