[The impartiality of ignorance? - A controversy between Paul Julius Möbius and Julius Wagner-Jauregg on the symptoms of reanimated persons after a suicide attempt through self-hanging].

INTRODUCTION: Between 1891 and 1893 the famous Austrian and German neuropsychiatrists Julius Wagner-Jauregg and Paul Julius Möbius disputed in leading German and Austrian medical journals about mental and physiological changes and symptoms in people who after strangulation could be revived in time to survive. Their dispute even touched personal issues.

METHODS: For the study, the original sources were studied and contrasted with relevant secondary sources.

RESULTS: The dispute was mainly about two opposing concepts: On the one hand, Wagner-Jauregg supported an organic, neurological concept; on the other hand a psychoreactive-symptoms concept represented by Möbius and elaborated by him first in his concept of hysteria.

DISCUSSION: The study elaborates these factual differences in completely different approaches to psychiatry and - at least in the case of Möbius - how a medical theory was embedded into a pre-existing philosophical system.

CONSEQUENCES: The dispute studied discusses a philosophical problem which has remained incompletely understood until the present day - the relationship of body and mind. Hence the study on this dispute is more than just an interesting aspect in the history of sciences, but rather the illustration of a meeting of two opponents in a still relevant discussion.