Gilbert Ballet (1853-1916) ou les débuts de la psychiatrie universitaire en France (Ã propos du centenaire de sa mort)

Gilbert Ballet begins his medical studies at Limoges and ends them in Paris. First chef de clinique of Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière hospital in 1882, he tries during his whole career to connect neurology and psychiatry, nervous and mental disorders. Hospital physician in 1884, fellow professor in 1886, he teaches at the faculty of medicine of Paris dating from 1893, but is appointed as titular professor only in 1907, in the chairs of history of medicine and then of clinic of mental disease at the Sainte-Anne hospital (1909). He creates in 1904 the first hospital department of “délirants” at the Hôtel-Dieu of Paris. Eclectic, positivist (like Auguste Comte), he opposes the theory of degeneracy of Valentin Magnan. He has written many works in neurology, endocrinology, clinical, social and forensic psychiatry, history of medicine. He has published books on aphasias (1886) and neurasthenia (1897, with the father of Marcel Proust), clinical lessons (1897) and a psychobiography of the Swedish philosopher and prophet Swedenborg. He also managed the first collective treatise of mental pathology in France (1903) and founded the review L'Encéphale. He has studied the relations of hysteria with alienation (after Charcot) and described the differential diagnostic between depressions (melancholia) that would be later called endogenous and reactive. But his name is essentially connected to the description of the chronic hallucinatory psychosis (1911-1916), between the works of Séglas and Clérambault on the semiology of the hallucinations.