Edward Charles Spitzka scrapbook on insanity and psychiatry

Edward Charles Spitzka was born in New York City, New York on November 10, 1852. He attended the College of the City of New York and the University of New York, studying medicine. He then studied further in Europe until 1876, when he returned to New York to practice medicine involving the central nervous system. At this point, he researched brains of animals and became more interested in mental health medicine as an early American psychologist. He joined the American Neurological Association in 1877, and held various leadership positions at regional neurological organizations as well. He is famed for testifying in the trial of Charles Guiteau, the assassin of president James A. Garfield, in 1881. In 1883, he published a groundbreaking manual on the diagnoses of mental illness, Treatise on Insanity: Its Classification, Diagnosis, and Treatment, and continued to do neurological research, discovering parts of the brains in many different animals. He had one child, Edward Anthony Spitzka, with Catherine Wacek, his wife. Spitzka died in 1914.