The French physician Philippe Pinel (1745-1826) was the major figure in early efforts to provide humane care and treatment for the mentally ill.

Philippe Pinel was born on April 20, 1745, in the hamlet of Roques. At 17 he entered the Collège d'Esquille in Toulouse to prepare for the priesthood, but he soon decided to study medicine. He received his doctorate in 1773 and continued his medical education at the University of Montpellier, France's leading medical school. In 1778 he settled in Paris, where he devoted himself to general studies in science while tutoring in mathematics. Pinel's work on clinical medicine, Nosographie philosophique (1789), was a standard textbook for 2 decades, and several 19th-century schools of thought on clinical medicine trace their origin to it.

Pinel's interests in the mentally ill gradually developed, and in 1793, through the aid of friends in the Revolutionary government of France, he was appointed physician-in-chief at l'Hospice de...