Ida Macalpine
german-British psychiatrist (1899–1974)
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.
Early life and education
Ida Wertheimer was born on 19 June 1899 in Nuremberg, Germany, to Matilde (née Lust) and Sigmund Wertheimer.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Ida Macalpine” as german-British psychiatrist (1899–1974). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q137163510. VIAF identifies the subject as 54192402. The Library of Congress control number is n82220001. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1899, 1974, 1933 and 1963.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ida Macalpine” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.