when was the first case of schizophrenia discovered
History of schizophrenia A detailed case 1809 report by John Haslam concerning James Tilly Matthews,[15] and a separate account by Philippe Pinel also published in 1809, are often regarded as the earliest cases of schizophrenia in the medical and psychiatric literature.[9] The Latinized term dementia praecox entered psychiatry in 1886 in a textbook by asylum physician Heinrich Schüle (1840-1916) of the Illenau asylum in Baden. He used the term to refer to hereditarily predisposed individuals who were "wrecked on the cliffs of puberty" and developed acute dementia, while others developed the chronic condition of hebephrenia. Emil Kraepelin had cited Schüle's 1886 textbook in the 1887 second edition of his own textbook, Psychiatrie, and hence was familiar with this term at least six years before he himself adopted it.[16][17]  It later appeared in 1891 in a case report by Arnold Pick which argued that hebephrenia should be regarded as a form of dementia praecox. Kraepelin first used the term in 1893. In 1899 Emil Kraepelin introduced a broad new distinction in the classification of mental disorders between dementia praecox and mood disorder (termed manic depression and including both unipolar and bipolar depression). Kraepelin believed that dementia praecox was caused by a lifelong, smoldering systemic or "whole body" process of a metabolic nature that would eventually affect the functioning of the brain in a final decisive cascade. Hence, he believed the entire body—all the organs, glands and peripheral nervous system—was implicated in the natural disease process.[18] Although he used the term "dementia," Kraepelin seemed to use the term synonymously with "mental weakness," mental defect," and "mental deterioration," but distinguished it from other uses of the term dementia, such as in Alzheimer's disease, which typically occur later in life.[19] In 1853 Bénédict Morel used the term démence précoce (precocious or early dementia) to describe a group of young patients who were suffering from "stupor".[20] It is sometimes argued that this first use of the term signals the medical discovery of schizophrenia. However, Morel employed the phrase in a purely descriptive sense and he did not intend to delineate a new diagnostic category. Moreover, his traditional conception of dementia differed significantly from that employed in the latter half of the nineteenth-century. Finally, there is no evidence that Morel's démence précoce had any influence on the later development of the dementia praecox concept by either Arnold Pick or Emil Kraepelin.[6]