Ida Macalpine

Ida Macalpine (formerly Hirschmann, née Wertheimer; 1899–1974) was a German and British psychiatrist. She was born in Germany, where she earned her medical degree and began her career as a physician. She moved to the United Kingdom in 1933 and specialized in psychiatry. She began extensively publishing on psychiatry, especially history of psychiatry, in the 1950s. Particularly fruitful was her collaboration with her son Richard A. Hunter, also a psychiatrist. She was initially strongly influenced by psychoanalysis, but abandoned it by the late 1950s. The first of her and Hunter's major works, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, was published in 1963. In George III and the Mad Business (1969), they identified King George III's apparent mental illness as porphyria. Their final major work, Psychiatry for the Poor: 1851–1973, was published shortly after her death.