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In collaboration with Lawrence Loeb, Leopold Bellak has again amassed the talent extent in schizophrenia producing this compendium entitled The Schizophrenic Syndrome. This formidable compilation reflects Bellak's 30-year interest in schizophrenia.
Titles are often interesting representations of prevailing assumptions within a field. From 1936 to 1946 Bellak called his volume Dementia Praecox, from 1946 to 1956 Schizophrenia, and now The Schizophrenic Syndrome. Thus, Bellak has moved in much the same circle as the general psychiatric field with regard to this enigmatic psychopathological state; the movement, however, has been in opposite direction.
Morel in 1850 observed what he felt was a hereditary degenerative disease with its onset in adolescence that he eventually named dementia praecox. This disease concept remained preponderant with the work of Hecker, Kahlbaum, and the great synthesizer, Kraepelin. The disease concept connoted an abnormal structure of physiological action in the living organism as a whole or in