---
title: "History of psychopathy"
chunk: 2/6
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_psychopathy"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:00:22.648437+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

== First uses of term ==
Initially physicians who specialised in mental disorders might be referred to as psychopaths (e.g. the American Journal of the Medical Sciences in 1864) and their hospitals as psychopathic institutions (compare to the etymologically similar use of the term homeopathic). Treatments of physical conditions by psychological or spiritualist methods might be referred to as psychopathic.
Up until the 1840s, the term psychopathy was also used in a way consistent with its etymology to refer to any illness of the mind. German psychiatrist von Feuchtersleben's (1845) The Principles of Medical Psychology, which was translated into English, used it in this sense, as well as the roughly equivalent new term psychosis, now traced back to Karl Friedrich Canstatt's Handbuch der Medicinischen Klinik (1841). William Griesinger (1868) and Krafft-Ebing (1886) also notably employed the term in distinct ways.
The use of the term in a criminological context was popularised by a high-profile legal case in Russia between 1883 and 1885, concerning the murder of a girl who had previously lived in Britain for some time, Sarah Becker (Sarra Bekker). The owner of the pawnbroker shop in which she worked and where her body was found, a retired military man Mr Mironovich, was eventually convicted on circumstantial evidence and imprisoned. In the meantime, however, a Ms Semenova had handed herself in saying she had killed Becker while trying to steal jewellery with her lover Bezak, a married policeman, though she soon recanted and changed her confession. Semenova was found not guilty following testimony from eminent Russian psychiatrist Prof Ivan M. Balinsky, who described her as a psychopath, still then a very general term. Dictionaries to this day note this as the first use of the noun, via British or American articles which had suggested a known murderer had been released and in some cases that psychopaths should be immediately hanged.
In 1888 Julius Ludwig August Koch first published on his concept of "psychopathic inferiority" (psychopathische Minderwertigkeiten), which would become influential domestically and internationally. He used it to refer to various kinds of dysfunction or strange conduct noted in patients in the absence of obvious mental illness or retardation. Koch was a Christian and also influenced by the degeneration theory popular in Europe at the time, though he referred to both congenital and acquired types. Habitual criminality was only a small part of his concept but the German public soon used the shortened version "inferiors" to refer to anyone supposedly suffering from an inherent ('constitutional') disposition toward crime.