Antoni Kepinski

Antoni Kepinski (Polish Antoni Kępiński) (1918 - 1972) was a Polish psychiatrist.

Educated in Cracow where he attended one of the best Grammar Schools and from 1936 he started his medical studies at the Jagiellonian University. Unfortunately, the beginning of the WWII broke his studies before graduation. As a student of medicine he volunteered for the Polish Army to defend his country from Nazi invasion. Then he was in internment in Hungary where he fled with some of Polish troops after Poland was entirely invaded by German armies. In 1940 he managed to escape from the internment and went to France and then Spain where he was caught by Franco's Fascists and put into the concentration camp of Miranda del Ebro. Later he was in Great Britain, for a short time with the Polish aircraft division but in 1944-1945 he continued his medical studies in Edinburgh graduating in 1946. Soon he returned to Poland and took up psychiatry on a post at the Psychiatric Clinic of Collegium Medicum in Cracow. As a concentration camp inmate himself he took part in a rehabilitation programme of survivors from the Auschwitz concentration camp. His medical career was really outstanding and apart from that he became one of the best Polish researchers in the field of psychiatry. His theories of information metabolism and axiological psychiatry are quite well known and his scientific work covers over 140 publications and several books.

His books :

• Psychopatologia nerwic (Psychopathology of neuroses)
• Schizofrenia (Schizophrenia)
• Melancholia (Melancholy)
• Psychopatie (Psychopathologies)
• Lek (Fear)
• Podstawowe zagadnienia wspolczesnej psychiatrii
• Poznanie chorego
• Rytm zycia (The Rhythm of Life)