Étienne-Jean Georget

Étienne-Jean Georget (1795-1828) was a French psychiatrist who was a native of Vernon-on-Brenne. He studied medicine in Tours and Paris, and afterwards worked at the Salpêtrière. In Paris he was a student and assistant to Philippe Pinel and Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol.

Georget specialized in the study of psychopathology, and made improvements to Pinel's nosology of mental illnesses. He classified several types of monomania by names such as "theomania" (religious obsession), "erotomania" (sexual obsession), "demonomania" (obsession with evil) and "homicidal monomania", which dealt with senseless murder.

In the early 1820s he commissioned painter Théodore Géricault to paint a series of portraits of mental patients so that his students could study the facial traits of "monomaniacs". Between 1821 and 1824 Géricault created ten paintings of mental patients, including those of a kidnapper, a kleptomaniac, a gambling addict and a woman "consumed with envy".