Early American Historians of Psychiatry: 1910–1960

Abstract

Abstract The first scholarly writing in the United States on the history of psychiatry appeared well after that in the major Western and Central European countries. In the New World, the long, cumulative cultural traditions of classical antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance were lacking. By and large, throughout the nineteenth century, intellectual and scientific inquiry remained at a level far below Europe’s. As a consequence, nineteenth-century American asylum physicians displayed almost no interest in the history of the care of the mentally ill. There is no evidence in the publications or private libraries of American alienists during this period of the historical writings of figures such as Philippe Pinel, J. E. D. Esquirol, J. C. A. Heinroth, and E. Feuchtersleben. Even the British literature on the history of psychiatry, such as Daniel Hack Tuke’s Insanity in Ancient and Modern Life (1878), which was available to American doctors in view of the common language, elicited little resonance in psychiatric circles. To be sure, some of the earliest representatives of American psychiatry (particularly Pliny Earle) spent time in European centers and visited old and well-known facilities for the mentally ill, such as the famous colony of Gheel in Belgium. But their reports about these travels focused on current practical approaches to the mentally ill rather than on historical background. A perusal of the volumes of the American Journal of Insanity indicates that the overriding emphasis was on institutional and clinical matters.2 Similarly, the pioneering historical monographs by nineteenth-century German psychiatrists that Otto Marx discussed in the preceding essay in this volume seem to have remained unknown in America until the advent of the twentieth century.