[Winkler's rabbits: the separation of the chairs in neurology and psychiatry in the Netherlands].

In 1914/15 and in 1925/26 the selection of candidates for the professorships of psychiatry and neurology at the Universities of Amsterdam and Utrecht was fiercely debated. The central theme was the question whether either anatomy or clinical observation was the basic element of psychiatry. Eventually the choice for the latter of these two possibilities led to a separation of the two disciplines psychiatry and neurology. Paradoxically the stubbornness of the main defender of the anatomical standpoint, Cornelis Winkler, the professor in psychiatry and neurology who in 1914 went from Amsterdam to Utrecht where he retired in 1925, catalysed this divisionary process.