In 1906, he was appointed an associate professor at Charles University. In 1908, he established and led the
Institute for Epileptics in Prague-
Libeň (Valentinum). Heveroch was the head of the psychiatric department of a
garrison hospital in Prague; in 1915, he was privy to a secret resistance organization, but in August 1917, he was sent to the Russian front. In the same year, he became the director of the
Prague Insane Asylum. He obtained full professorship in 1921. He was a member of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and Arts, Academy of Labour and the State Medical Board. He was also Vice President of the Society of the
National Theatre (he let the actors study examples of
psychosis in his department for some of their roles). Heveroch was associated with the Psychiatric Clinic in Prague, but never became its leader; instead he left in 1904, and in 1924, established a second psychiatric hospital, which closed three years after he died. He also studied psychology and psychiatry of
everyday life and tirelessly popularized psychiatry among laymen. His name thus became famous enough to become popular as a synonym for a psychiatrist.; and so, people used to say, "we'll call Heveroch [a psychiatrist] on you", similarly as they later used the names of Mysliveček or
Vondráček for the same purpose.
"Pinel is said to be the one who removed the shackles from the mentally ill, Heveroch has [in Bohemia] opened the prison of psychiatry and let it get outside of the walls." In his medical research, he frequently applied the therapeutic principles of
psychotherapy (psychagogic,
persuasion), but he did not use
hypnosis and harshly rejected
Freud's psychoanalysis. However, he acknowledged the existence of the
subconscious. From a philosophical point of view he was close to
vitalism. He refused
psychophysical parallelism. His direct pupils were
Vladimír Vondráček (1895–1978) and Otakar Janota (1898–1969). He himself was a pupil of Josef Thomayer (1853–1927). Vondráček described him as a respectable man, gentle, sober, with a focus on
mathematics and
philosophy, with a sense of humor, as an excellent speaker, trainer, organizer and debater.
"He was extremely tidy. He was a man "adjusted to the vertical", which means that the pens on his desk were carefully and vertically sorted (...) He walked quickly, often with his hands folded on his back, with his head tilted to the side." In more than 100 original works and articles, he devoted himself to various topics:
aphasia and
agnosia, the awareness of our own existence, the rhythm of life and its defects, the
intuition, loss of awareness of our feelings, the
self-reference and
causality, the
obsession,
delusions,
hallucinations,
faint states, the soul of a crowd, "children pathologically lying", the
restless children, and crime associated with school children, among other things. His book
Diagnostika chorob duševních (Diagnosis of Mental Diseases, 1904) became the basic textbook of the Czechoslovak psychiatry, together with the book
Psychiatrie (Psychiatry, 1897) by Kuffner (1858–1940). His essay
O podivínech a lidech nápadných (On Freaks and Striking People, 1901) vividly depicts portraits of patients (from today's perspective) who had
psychopathy or
personality disorder. This book allegedly inspired
Jaroslav Hašek when writing his
Švejk, Heveroch's name is mentioned several times in the novel. His work is pioneering and many of his ideas are still valid today. For example, in the six-part series called
O poruchách jáství (On the Disorders of the
Self, 1910), he was the first in
Bohemia to cover the phenomenon of
depersonalization (although he didn't use this designation). ==Personal life==