Educated at the universities at Bonn, Halle and Coblenz, Erlenmyer received his MD in 1875. In 1877, he became the Director of the Berndorf Erlenmyer Institute, a private mental asylum founded by his father. Erlenmyer experimented with various opiates such as morphine and cocaine in the treatment of mental illness. This methodology was also adopted by Sigmund Freud, who used cocaine as a treatment for morphine addiction. Erlenmyer tested this theory in 1885 and came to the conclusion that the treatment was as dangerous as the original problem. The Erlenmyer clinic was eventually dissolved in 1920, the victim of rampant German inflation in the Weimar years. His works include On the Treatment of the Morphine Habit (1889). |
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