Bénédict Augustin Morel (22 November 1809 – 30 March 1873) was a French psychiatrist born in Vienna, Austria.

In the aftermath of the War of the Sixth Coalition Morel was abandoned by his parents, and left with the Luxembourgish Abbé Dupont and his servant Marianne, who raised him.

[1] Morel received his education in Paris, and while a student, supplemented his income by teaching English and German classes.

At the Maréville asylum he studied people with mental disabilities, researching their family histories and investigating aspects such as poverty and childhood physical illnesses.

In the 1850s, he developed a theory of "degeneration" in regards to mental problems that take place from early life to adulthood.

In the first volume of his Études cliniques (1852) Morel used the term démence précoce in passing to describe the characteristics of a subset of young patients,[4] and he employed the phrase more frequently in his textbook Traité des maladies mentales which was published in 1860.

[7] While some have sought to interpret, if in a qualified fashion, Morel's reference to démence précoce as amounting to the "discovery" of schizophrenia,[6] others have argued convincingly that Morel's descriptive use of the term should not be considered in any sense as a precursor to the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin's dementia praecox disease concept.

[8] This is due to the fact that their concepts of dementia differed significantly from each other, with Kraepelin employing the more modern sense of the word, and also that Morel was not describing a diagnostic category.

[11] This theory explained why there was an increase in mental disorders and also allowed Morel to relate very different diseases as caused by previous generations because they had become more variable over time.

In his work, he included images of twelve patients that demonstrated the physical, mental, and moral traits that were evidence of degeneration.

Some of these characteristics included altered ear shape, asymmetrical faces, extra digits, and high-domed palates that had psychological representations as well.

[16] Morel's degeneration theory gained quick popularity across Europe, which allowed it to shape further scientific developments.

Karl Pearson and Sidney Webb justified selective breeding and immigration in Britain by trying to prevent the degeneration of the British race.

Sigmund Freud, Karl Jaspers, Adolf Meyer, and Oswald Bumke rejected his ideas.