Jacques-Étienne Belhomme (29 January 1800 – 16 February 1880) was a French
psychiatrist
A psychiatrist is a physician who specializes in psychiatry. Psychiatrists are physicians who evaluate patients to determine whether their symptoms are the result of a physical illness, a combination of physical and mental ailments or strictly ...
who was a native of Paris. He was the son of
carpenter
Carpentry is a skilled trade and a craft in which the primary work performed is the cutting, shaping and installation of building materials during the construction of buildings, ships, timber bridges, concrete formwork, etc. Carpenter ...
Jacques Belhomme (1737–1824), who managed a ''maison de santé'' (
Pension Belhomme
The Pension Belhomme was a prison and private clinic during the French Revolution in the Rue de Charonne ( 11e arrondissement, Paris).
Around 1765, the joiner Jacques Belhomme took on the construction of a building for the son of a neighbour, a ...
) for the insane on Rue de Charonne in Paris.
Belhomme studied medicine in Paris, and worked under
Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol
Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol (3 February 1772 – 12 December 1840) was a French psychiatrist.
Early life and education
Born and raised in Toulouse, Esquirol completed his education at Montpellier. He came to Paris in 1799 where he worked a ...
(1772–1840) at the
Salpêtrière. His 1824
dissertation, ''Essai sur l´idiotie'' was one of the earliest works dedicated to the education of the mentally handicapped. After his father's death in 1824, he inherited the elder Belhomme's ''maison de santé''.
Belhomme was a leading figure in French
phrenology
Phrenology is a pseudoscience that involves the measurement of bumps on the skull to predict mental traits. It is based on the concept that the Human brain, brain is the organ of the mind, and that certain brain areas have localized, specific ...
, and believed that insanity could be
anatomically
Anatomy () is the branch of Morphology (biology), morphology concerned with the study of the internal structure of organisms and their parts. Anatomy is a branch of natural science that deals with the structural organization of living things ...
localized in certain regions of the brain. In 1839 he became secretary of the ''Société phrénologique''. Publications by Belhomme include:
* ''Considerations sur l'appreciation de la folie, sa localisation et son traitement'', 1834
* ''Quatrième Mémoire sur la localisation des fonctions cérébrales et d la folie'', 1845
See also
*
Jean-Baptiste-Maximien Parchappe de Vinay
Bibliography
Console and Classify, the French Psychiatric Profession by
Jan E. Goldstein
Psicologia - RedePsi PsiPédia(translated biography from Portuguese)
External links
*
French psychiatrists
Physicians from Paris
1800 births
1880 deaths
{{France-psychiatrist-stub