S. D. Lamb.Pathologist of the Mind: Adolf Meyer and the Origins of American Psychiatry

Abstract

Pathologist of the Mind recounts the life and times of psychiatrist Adolf Meyer, one of the most influential psychiatrists of the first half of the twentieth century, although he is not frequently mentioned today. Part intellectual biography, part institutional history, Lamb's monograph covers the period from 1892 to 1917, beginning with Meyer's intellectual training, and moving in later chapters to the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins University. Meyer oversaw this clinic, founded in 1913, where, as Lamb argues, a scientifically based, clinical practice of psychiatry in the United States was inaugurated. One of the aims of this monograph is to highlight Meyer's importance in creating links between the study of pathological anatomy and the clinical case—a central foundation for American psychiatry. A Swiss-German, Meyer trained in medicine at the University of Zurich. He was skeptical of the brain localization schemes proliferating in Theodor Meynert's German school, a materialism that August Forel, Meyer's mentor, called “brain mythology.” Meyer emigrated to Chicago in 1892, leaving his mother behind, whose mental illness had influenced Meyer's choice of career, and who was later institutionalized at Meyer's training hospital—the Burghölzli. Working in asylums near Chicago and in Worcester, Massachusetts, Meyer exhorted his colleagues to develop a rigorous approach to clinical assessment, and interwove pathological, experimental, and clinical data into his scientific approach to clinical psychiatry.