Étienne-Jean Georget was a French psychiatrist

Psychiatrist

A psychiatrist is a physician who specializes in the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders. All psychiatrists are trained in diagnostic evaluation and in psychotherapy...

 who was a native of Vernon-on-Brenne. He studied medicine in Tours

Tours

Tours is a city in central France, the capital of the Indre-et-Loire department.It is located on the lower reaches of the river Loire, between Orléans and the Atlantic coast. Touraine, the region around Tours, is known for its wines, the alleged perfection of its local spoken French, and for the...

 and Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

, and afterwards worked at the Salpêtrière. In Paris he was a student and assistant to Philippe Pinel

Philippe Pinel

Philippe Pinel was a French physician who was instrumental in the development of a more humane psychological approach to the custody and care of psychiatric patients, referred to today as moral therapy...

 and Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol

Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol

Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol was a French psychiatrist.Born and raised in Toulouse, Esquirol completed his education at Montpellier...

.

Georget specialized in the study of psychopathology

Psychopathology

Psychopathology is the study of mental illness, mental distress, and abnormal/maladaptive behavior. The term is most commonly used within psychiatry where pathology refers to disease processes...

, and made improvements to Pinel's nosology of mental illnesses. He classified several types of monomania

Monomania

In 19th century psychiatry, monomania is a single pathological preoccupation in an otherwise sound mind. Emotional monomania is that in which the patient is obsessed with only one emotion or several related to it; intellectual monomania is that which is related to only one kind of delirious idea...

 by names such as "theomania" (religious obsession), "erotomania

Erotomania

Erotomania is a type of delusion in which the affected person believes that another person, usually a stranger or famous person, is in love with him or her. The illness often occurs during psychosis, especially in patients with schizophrenia or bipolar mania...

" (sexual obsession), "demonomania" (obsession with evil) and "homicidal monomania", which dealt with senseless murder.

In the early 1820s he commissioned painter Théodore Géricault

Théodore Géricault

Jean-Louis André Théodore Géricault was a profoundly influential French artist, painter and lithographer, known for The Raft of the Medusa and other paintings...

 to paint a series of portraits of mental patients so that his students could study the facial traits of "monomaniacs". Between 1821 and 1824 Géricault created ten paintings of mental patients, including those of a kidnapper, a kleptomaniac (see Portrait of a Kleptomaniac

Portrait of a Kleptomaniac

Portrait of a Kleptomaniac or Portrait of an Insane Person is a 1822 oil painting by Théodore Géricault...

), a gambling addict and a woman "consumed with envy".