Franz Josef Kallmann

Franz Josef Kallmann
Born(1897-07-24)July 24, 1897
Neumarkt, Silesia
DiedMay 12, 1965(1965-05-12) (aged 67)
New York
NationalityGerman, American
Known forKallmann's syndrome
Scientific career
FieldsPsychiatry

Franz Josef Kallmann, MD (July 24, 1897 – May 12, 1965), a German-born American psychiatrist, was one of the pioneers in the study of the genetic basis of psychiatric disorders. He developed the use of twin studies in the assessment of the relative roles of heredity and the environment in the pathogenesis of psychiatric disease.

Kallmann was born in Neumarkt, Silesia, the son of Marie (née Mordze / Modrey) and Bruno Kallmann, who was a surgeon and general practitioner.[1][2] He fled Germany in 1936 for the United States, because he was of Jewish heritage.[3] Paradoxically, he had been a student of Ernst Rüdin, one of the architects of racial hygiene policies in Nazi Germany.[4] In a speech delivered in 1935, while still in Germany, he advocated the examination of relatives of schizophrenia patients with the aim to find and sterilize the "nonaffected carriers" of the supposed recessive gene responsible for the condition.[5]

In 1944, he described a congenital endocrine condition (hypogonadotropic hypogonadism with anosmia) that has come to be known as Kallmann's syndrome.

He was a member of the American Eugenics Movement during the first half of 1900.[6][7]

In 1948, he became one of the founders of the American Society of Human Genetics.[4]

He died in New York.

  1. ^ "Who was who in America". Marquis-Who's Who. 17 February 1968 – via Google Books.
  2. ^ "RootsWeb.com Home Page". freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com.
  3. ^ Obituary Franz Joseph Kallman, 1897-1965, The American Journal of Psychiatry, July 1966, Issue 123 pages 105-106
  4. ^ a b Torrey EF, Yolken RH (September 2009). "Psychiatric Genocide: Nazi Attempts to Eradicate Schizophrenia". Schizophr Bull. 36 (1): 26–32. doi:10.1093/schbul/sbp097. PMC 2800142. PMID 19759092.
  5. ^ Muller-Hill B. Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies, and Others in Germany, 1933–1945.Woodbury, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press; 1988: 11, 31, 42–43, 70.
  6. ^ Stephen, Pow; Stahnisch, Frank (7 July 2016). "Eugenics ideals, racial hygiene, and the emigration process of German-American neurogeneticist Franz Josef Kallmann (1897–1965)". Journal of the History of the Neurosciences. 25 (3): 253–274. doi:10.1080/0964704X.2016.1187486. PMID 27388255. S2CID 205664888. Retrieved 7 February 2021.
  7. ^ Whitaker, Robert (2019). "Chapter 3". Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill (Second ed.). Perseus Publishing. p. 384. ISBN 978-0-465-02014-0. Retrieved 7 February 2021.