In memory of Professor Jan Mazurkiewicz in the 70th anniversary of his death

Abstract

This article reminisces about the life and career of Jan Mazurkiewicz, one of the most outstanding Polish psychiatrists – the author of Psychophysiological Theory, an original conception of mental disease based on the theory of evolution and dissolution of the nervous system developed by the English neurologist John Hughlings Jackson.

Professor Jan Mazurkiewicz was an active organizer of psychiatric care. He was co-founder and director of hospitals in Kochanówka and Kobierzyn. He held the rank of Associate Professor at the John Casimir University in Lviv and the position of Professor at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. From 1919 until his death in 1947, Professor Jan Mazurkiewicz was the head of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Warsaw. For twenty three years, starting from 1924, he was the president of the Polish Psychiatric Association. The Mazurkiewicz's Psychopathological Theory provides a natural model of development of the highest psychic functions. Damage to a higher evolutionary level of the nervous system leads to the activation of the previously suppressed lower levels, transformed by the pathogen into psychopathological symptoms.

Mazurkiewicz's scientific thought was adopted and developed by his student and then, collaborator, Professor Mieczysław Kaczyński, who was later to become the head of the Department of Psychiatry in Lublin. This work discusses the research conducted at Lublin's Department of Psychiatry which expands on Mazurkiewicz's theory.