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Eugen Bleuler died at the place of his birth near Zürich on July 15, 1939, at the age of eighty-three. His passing underscores an important landmark in the history of psychopathology. A German Swiss, earnest, methodical, puritanic, but endowed with a keen and gentle sense of humor, Bleuler belonged to that truly wonderful generation of scholars whose scientific life was characterized by bold trail blazing yet remarkable steadiness. Following his graduation from medical school in 1883, he spent but one year (1884–85) in Gudden's laboratory in Munich. Otherwise his scientific training and research took place exclusively in Switzerland. In 1898 he succeeded Forel as chief of the Bürgholzli mental hospital and became Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Zürich, a post which he held for thirty years. He then revisited the United States, taking part in the opening exercises of the New York State Psychiatric Institute when the latter moved to its new building at the Columbia University Medical Center. Twenty-five years previously he had come to this country to participate in the dedication of the Phipps Clinic, at which time he presented his classic paper on autistic thinking, the only work of Bleuler, I believe, which first saw light in the English language.
Bleuler is best known for his work on schizophrenia, published in 1911 as the second volume of Aschaffenburg's Handbuch under the title Dementia Praecox (Die Gruppe der Schizophrenien). The new term used as a parenthetic subtitle became universally accepted almost instantaneously. Unfortunately this monumental work has never been translated into English. What the English speaking psychiatrist knows about Bleuler's concept of schizophrenia has been learned by word of mouth or through the condensed summary found in Bleuler's Textbook of Psychiatry, published in 1924