About Ernst Rüdin
Ernst Rüdin (19 April 1874 – 22 October 1952) was a Swiss psychiatrist, geneticist, eugenicist and Nazi, rising to prominence under Emil Kraepelin and assuming the directorship at the German Institute for Psychiatric Research in Munich. While he has been credited as a pioneer of psychiatric inheritance studies, he also argued for, designed, justified and funded the mass sterilization and clinical killing of adults and children. == Early career == Rüdin was born on 19 April 1874 in St. Gallen, Switzerland, the son of Conrad Rüdin, a textile salesman. From 1893 until graduating in 1898, he studied medicine in Geneva, Lausanne, Naples, Heidelberg, Berlin, Dublin and Zürich. In 1899, at the Burghölzli in Zürich, Rüdin worked as an assistant to psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, who coined the term schizophrenia. He completed his PhD, then a psychiatric residency at a prison in Moabit, Berlin. From 1907, Rüdin worked at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München as an assistant to Emil Kraepelin, the highly influential psychiatrist who had developed the diagnostic split between 'dementia praecox' ('early dementia' – reflecting his pessimistic prognosis – renamed schizophrenia) and 'manic-depressive illness' (including unipolar depression), and who is considered by many to be the father of modern psychiatric classification. He became senior lecturer in 1909, as well as senior physician at the Munich Psychiatric Hospital, succeeding Alois Alzheimer. Kraepelin and Rüdin were both ardent advocates of a theory that the German race was becoming overly 'domesticated' and thus degenerating into higher rates of mental illness and other conditions.
Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.