Vampirism | |
---|---|
Other names | Renfield's syndrome, Renfield syndrome |
Specialty | Psychiatry |
Clinical vampirism, more commonly known as Renfield's syndrome, is an obsession with drinking blood. The earliest presentation of clinical vampirism in psychiatric literature was a psychoanalytic interpretation of two cases, contributed by Richard L. Vanden Bergh and John. F. Kelley.[1] As the authors point out, over 50,000 people addicted to drinking blood have appeared in psychiatric literature from 1892 to 2010.[vague] This was documented in the work of Austrian forensic psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing. Many medical publications concerning clinical vampirism can be found in the literature of forensic psychiatry, with the behavior being reported as an aspect of extraordinary violent crimes.[2][3][4]