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The attempt to classify men into types has always lured the thinker from the earliest times and has been frequently attempted from various points of view. Hippocrates made the attempt to account for health and disease on the basis of his humoral doctrine and now Kretschmer attempts to correlate certain temperaments with certain bodily configurations.
To understand the contribution of Kretschmer one must bear in mind the major accomplishment of Kraepelin in the field of psychiatry. The service which he rendered by the separation of the two great groups of psychoses, the manic—depressive and the schizophrenic, based upon their course and outcome, is too well known to require comment. It is upon the basis of these two great groups that Kretschmer's work, in the first instance, takes its origin. The first problem he set himself was to see if there was any correlation between these two fundamental psychoses and the physical make—up as it could be observed and measured from the surface. In other words, whether the manic—depressives (circulars or cycloids) and the dementia precoxes (schizophrenes or schizoids) exhibited each or both a characteristic bodily make—up. For this purpose he investigated in his first series 85 circulars and 175 schizophrenes to which were later added over 100 further cases, bringing the total number investigated to 400 cases.
The details included in the main the face and skull; the general physique including musculature, fat distribution, proportions of limbs and extremities, chest, stomach, shoulders, pelvis; the surface of the body including pigment, hair; the glands; the measurements of the height, chest, shoulders, limbs, and skull; and certain temporal considerations such as age, onset of psychosis and physical illness.
From a consideration of these details three types emerged as follows: