El concurso de la Académie Royale de Médecine de Paris, 1843: Análisis contextual de la emergencia de los primeros trabajos acerca de la herencia de la locura (A. Gaussail y E. Gintrac)

the purpose of this work is to analyze the appearance of the first french publications dealing with the heredity of mental illnesses. as it has been shown by others scholars, france was the country where the hereditarian subject was specially observed from a medical point of view. from 1850 a great part of the alienist profession considered that the heredity was a essential component of the mental pathologies. after describing the relevance that until 1850 the psychiatrists gave to that factor, this paper shows that the medical knowledge about heredity must be taken into account in order to understand how and why, ant thanks to a contest announced by the académie royale de médecine, the first treatises dealing with the subject (written by a. gaussail and e. gintrac) finally appeared.