During the first half of the twentieth century, Adolf Meyer was the most authoritative and influential psychiatrist in the United States. In 1908, when the Johns Hopkins Hospital established the ...first American university clinic devoted to psychiatry—still a nascent medical specialty at the time—Meyer was selected to oversee the enterprise. The Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic opened in 1913, and Meyer served as psychiatrist-in-chief at the hospital until 1941.
In Pathologist of the Mind, S. D. Lamb explores how Meyer used his powerful position to establish psychiatry as a clinical science that operated like the other academic disciplines at the country’s foremost medical school. In addition to successfully arguing for a scientific and biological approach to mental illness, Meyer held extraordinary sway over state policies regarding the certification of psychiatrists. He also trained hundreds of specialists who ultimately occupied leadership positions and made significant contributions in psychiatry, neurology, experimental psychology, social work, and public health.
Although historians have long recognized Meyer’s authority, his concepts and methods have never before received a systematic historical analysis. His convoluted theory of “psychobiology,” along with his notoriously ineffective attempts to explain it in print, continue to baffle many clinicians. Pathologist of the Mind aims to rediscover Meyerian psychiatry by eavesdropping on Meyer’s informal and private conversations with his patients and colleagues. Weaving together private correspondence and uniquely detailed case histories, Lamb examines Meyer’s efforts to institute a clinical science of psychiatry in the United States—one that harmonized the expectations of scientific medicine with his concept of the person as a biological organism and mental illness as an adaptive failure. The first historian ever granted access to these exceptional medical records, Lamb offers a compelling new perspective on the integral but misunderstood legacy of Adolf Meyer.
Adolf Meyer (1866–1950) est considéré comme l’un des psychiatres les plus connus aux États-Unis et son influence y a été prépondérante, notamment entre 1895 et la Seconde Guerre mondiale. À l’aube ...des années 1900, Meyer a entrepris une restructuration du système asilaire et, sous son impulsion, les « asiles d’aliénés » commencent, au moins en certains endroits, à devenir des lieux de soins. Après en avoir supervisé les travaux de construction, Meyer est nommé, en 1913, directeur de la première clinique psychiatrique aux États-Unis – Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic – qui deviendra dans les années qui suivirent un des plus prestigieux centres de recherches et de formation en psychiatrie. C’est au sein de la clinique psychiatrique Henry Phipps que Meyer a pu promouvoir ce qu’il a nommé en 1901 la « nouvelle psychiatrie », puis en 1908, la psychobiologie. La psychobiologie est devenue synonyme de psychiatrie meyerienne. Meyer a largement contribué à ce que les troubles mentaux fassent l’objet de recherches scientifiques et cliniques, d’une formation médicale spécifique et de traitements appropriés.
Adolf Meyer (1866–1950) is considered one of the most famous psychiatrists in the United States and his influence was preponderant, particularly between 1895 and the Second World War. In the early 1900s, Meyer undertook a restructuring of the asylums system and, under his leadership, insane asylums began, at least in some places, to become institutions of care. After overseeing its construction, Meyer was appointed in 1913 as superintendent of the first psychiatric clinic in the United States – Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic – which would become one of the most prestigious psychiatric researches and training centers in the years that followed. It was at the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic that Meyer was able to promote what he called “the new psychiatry” in 1901 and then psychobiology in 1908. Psychobiology has become synonymous with Meyerian psychiatry. Meyer has made a significant contribution to ensuring that mental disorders are the subject of scientific and clinical research, specific medical training and appropriate treatment.
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Adolf Meyer (1866–1950) exercised considerable influence over the development of Anglo-American psychiatry during the first half of the twentieth century. The concepts and techniques he implemented ...at his prominent Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins remain important to psychiatric practice and neuro-scientific research today. In the 1890s, Meyer revised scientific medicine’s traditional notion of clinical skill to serve what he called the ‘New Psychiatry’, a clinical discipline that embodied social and scientific ideals shared with other ‘new’ progressive reform movements in the United States. This revision conformed to his concept of psychobiology – his biological theory of mind and mental disorders – and accorded with his definition of scientific medicine as a unity of clinical–pathological methods and therapeutics. Combining insights from evolutionary biology, neuron theory and American pragmatist philosophy, Meyer concluded that subjective experience and social behaviour were functions of human biology. In addition to the time-honoured techniques devised to exploit the material data of the diseased body – observing and recording in the clinic, dissecting in the morgue and conducting histological experiments in the laboratory – he insisted that psychiatrists must also be skilled at wielding social interaction and interpersonal relationships as investigative and therapeutic tools in order to conceptualise, collect, analyse and apply the ephemeral data of ‘social adaptation’. An examination of his clinical practices and teaching at Johns Hopkins between 1913 and 1917 shows how particular historical and intellectual contexts shaped Meyer’s conceptualisation of social behaviour as a biological function and, subsequently, his new vision of clinical skill for twentieth-century psychiatry.
ABSTRACTHistorians recognize Adolf Meyer (1866–1950), first psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, as one of the principal architects of clinical psychiatry in the United States. This ...wholesale influence on the fledgling discipline had much to do with the authority he wielded as a Hopkins chief, but an important question remainswhy was Meyer the obvious candidate to establish a department of psychiatry at the nation’s foremost institution for medical research and teaching? Taking examples from Meyer’s employment in three large American asylums before his appointment to Johns Hopkins in 1908, this article explores how he transformed an improvised set of practices into a clinical system for psychiatry that he implemented on a widespread scale, something that garnered him a reputation as a modernizer of outdated asylums and pegged him, in the minds of Hopkins authorities, as a psychiatric exemplar of commitment to pathological research and clinical teaching.
Adolf Bernhard Meyer (1840-1911), a German-Jewish medical scientist, naturalist and museum director, travelled and collected in northwest New Guinea between March and July 1873. He was one of the ...first German-born naturalists to visit New Guinea and the first to publish extensively in German on his field experiences there. Though his subsequent career as a museum director was built on the scientific results and collections from this expedition, after his death the expedition itself was largely forgotten and the publications resulting from it -- including a lengthy travelogue and works on New Guinean physical anthropology, language and religious beliefs -- were ignored or discredited. This paper re-examines this neglected corpus of scholarship and considers the ways in which Meyer's encounters with indigenous New Guineans influenced his contributions to discussions, in the European metropoles, of racial difference. On the one hand, Meyer's perceptions of 'Papuan' physical and cultural identity were shaped by his pre-voyage readings, particularly of works by the British traveller-naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace and the German psychologist and ethnologist Theodor Waitz, and by the constraints, on his post-voyage publications, of genre and discourse. On the other hand, these perceptions were constantly challenged in the field by his actual encounters with indigenous New Guineans and by the diversity and unexpectedness of their physical appearances, initiatives, demeanours and actions. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
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Adolf Bernhard Meyer (1840-1911), a German-Jewish medical scientist, naturalist and museum director, travelled and collected in northwest New Guinea between March and July 1873. He was one of the ...first German-born naturalists to visit New Guinea and the first to publish extensively in German on his field experiences there. Though his subsequent career as a museum director was built on the scientific results and collections from this expedition, after his death the expedition itself was largely forgotten and the publications resulting from it - including a lengthy travelogue and works on New Guinean physical anthropology, language and religious beliefs - were ignored or discredited. This paper re-examines this neglected corpus of scholarship and considers the ways in which Meyer's encounters with indigenous New Guineans influenced his contributions to discussions, in the European metropoles, of racial difference. On the one hand, Meyer's perceptions of 'Papuan' physical and cultural identity were shaped by his pre-voyage readings, particularly of works by the British traveller-naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace and the German psychologist and ethnologist Theodor Waitz, and by the constraints, on his post-voyage publications, of genre and discourse. On the other hand, these perceptions were constantly challenged in the field by his actual encounters with indigenous New Guineans and by the diversity and unexpectedness of their physical appearances, initiatives, demeanours and actions.
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BFBNIB, DOBA, INZLJ, IZUM, KILJ, NMLJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, ZRSKP
This paper examines the historical sources for W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki's celebrated monograph on The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. It first characterizes the work itself, a ...monumental interpretive casebook of largely biographical material about individuals and groups. It then seeks the origins of these qualities, looking first at Thomas's prior work, then at the personal influence of Florian Znaniecki and Robert Park. Since these sources do not sufficiently account for the unique qualities of the work, we then turn to three other important sources: 1) the casebook tradition in the social reform literature and beyond, 2) the psychiatric concept of the life history, and 3) the literary sources that Thomas had taught in his prior career as an English professor. We close by identifying the autobiographical roots of the work in Thomas's own life history. Reprinted by permission of Springer
Andrew Scull reviews "Pathologist of the Mind: Adolf Meyer and the origins of American psychiatry," by S. D. Lamb, who provides one of the few book-length biographies of Meyer, a leading figure in ...American psychiatry for the first half of the 20th century. "Pathologist of the Mind" is part of the effort to provoke a resurgence of interest in Meyer's pioneering work..
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