William Boven's 1915 thesis “Similarity and Mendelism in the heredity of dementia praecox and manic-depressive insanity”

Abstract

Boven published, in 1915, his MD thesis at the University of Lausanne in which he examined 60 3- to 4-generation pedigrees ascertained from admitted patients with dementia praecox (DP) and manic-depressive insanity (MDI). He asked three questions: (i) were DP and MDI hereditary? (ii) were they the same or distinct conditions? and (iii) were they Mendelian disorders? Based on the rarity of environmental precipitants severe enough to cause disorder onset and the pattern of disorders in relatives, Boven concluded that both disorders were inherited. He found that MDI largely ran in families through direct transmission across generations while DP was only common in collateral relatives. Both pedigrees contained a substantial number of “psychopathic” (personality disordered) relatives in which DP and MDI pedigrees typically had, respectively, paranoid, and dysthymic/cyclothymic features. Boven concludes that their inheritance is largely distinct but not exclusive, as some pedigrees contained cases of both disorders. With assistance from Wilhelm Weinberg, Boven applied algebraic models with proband correction to rates of DP and MDI in sibships and found the results inconsistent with Mendelian transmission. His study represents among the first examinations, using “modern” methods, of the familial relationship between DP and MDI and the first published in French.