Benjamin Ball (physician)


Benjamin Ball was an English-born French psychiatrist, Professor of Mental Medicine in the Paris Faculty.
He was born at Naples, his father being an Englishman and his mother a native of Switzerland. He became a naturalised Frenchman in 1849,
and spent the whole of his professional life in Paris.
He studied medicine under Jacques-Joseph Moreau de Tours and Jean-Martin Charcot and was an assistant of Charles Lasègue at the Salpêtrière Hospital. During his internat he was Laureate of the Academy of Medicine. He became doctor of medicine in 1862.
In 1877 Benjamin Ball was the first to be appointed to the "Clinical Chair of Mental and Cerebral Diseases" in the Paris Faculty, to the detriment of his rival Valentin Magnan.
In collaboration with Jules Bernard Luys, he founded in 1881 the journal L'Encéphale.
Ball is the author of numerous works relating to mental diseases such as On erotic insanity, and On persecution deliria. In 1885, he published a trail-blazing treatrise On morphinomania, in which he evidenced the toxic effects of cocaine which were not absolutely acknowledged at the time.

Selected written works