Ewald Hecker

Ewald Hecker (20 October 1843, Halle – 11 January 1909, Wiesbaden) was a German psychiatrist who was an important figure in the early days of modern psychiatry.

[1] He is known for research done with his mentor, psychiatrist Karl Ludwig Kahlbaum (1828-1899).

Together they provided clinical analyses of the mentally ill, and arranged their disorders into specific, descriptive categories.

It was during this period that Hecker developed the concepts of hebephrenia[2] and cyclothymia.

[3] The pioneering research of Kahlbaum and Hecker proposed the existence of more than one discrete psychiatric disorder,[4] which contrasted with the concept of "unitary psychosis" that maintained all psychiatric symptoms were manifestations of a single mental disorder.