The Meaning of psychosomatic medicine.

Abstract

notion that the mind and body are closely related in their behavior is as old as medicine and philosophy. Aristotle and Hippocrates knew it; Paracelsus proclaimed it; and Jean Paul Marat elaborated upon it he whose career as a distinguished ophthalmologist ended before he took his tragic part in the French Revolution. But for the more modern origins of what is now called psychosomatic medicine we must look to the Germany of the early eighteen hundreds particularly to the work of Nasse (1778-1851) and Jacobi (1775-1858). In America, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., was alive to the effects of social and personal problems on health, but he judged his professional colleagues not yet ready to accept such ideas, so he dispensed them in the form of his three medicated novels Elsie Venner, A Mortal Antipathy and The Guardian AngeL Toward the close of the last century a Boston physician, Dr. Robert T. Edes, wrote The New England Invalid, a classical description of a familiar type of woman patient in whom emotional disturbances and physical symptoms co-exist. A few years later Dr. James Jackson Putnam, the first professor of Neurology at Harvard, and one of the earliest Americans to come under the influence of Freud, wrote an article called Not the Disease Only But Also the Man. These random historical items are straws pointing the wind. Many others could be found. In our own time and place it is Dr.