William Hirsch

William Hirsch was a German-trained physician and psychiatrist who practiced in New York at the end of the nineteenth century. His study Genius and Degeneration, published in German in 1894 and in English in 1897, argued against Cesare Lombroso and Max Nordau that genius is not a form of insanity and that the fashionable diagnosis of degeneration had confused eccentricity and originality with disease; its long chapter on Richard Wagner was much discussed. He later published Religion and Civilization, a psychiatrist's view of religious experience. Little else is recorded of his life.