Pathologist of the Mind: Adolf Meyer and the Origins of American Psychiatry

by S.D. Lamb

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.

Genres: Psychiatry

330 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 30, 2014

Reviews

[Ed · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been interested in Adolf Meyer since my training as a psychiatrist forty years ago. While one might say that Meyer, who was the most influential American psychiatrist in the first half of the twentieth century, is the forgotten psychiatrist of the twenty-first, his teachings were still in the air in the 1970s. But they were just in the air. Freudian theories and treatments were what we were taught. Trying to find out just what Meyer thought and did was difficult, not just because his writings were not a part of our curriculum, but because his writings were impenetrable.
Many thanks are now due the historian Susan Lamb for writing a lively and lucid account of Meyer's most creative period-- the twenty years before the World War I. She provides a chapter on his life and influences and another on his concept of psychobiology. She also uses a day in the life of a typical patient in the facility Meyer ran to show how every detail of a patient's life was used in a therapeutic effort. She then provides two lengthy case histories the show the implications of Meyer's ideas. These are beautifully presented and really gave me a sense of how psychiatrists thought about patients in the early years of the twentieth century. She ends with a chapter that tries to relate Meyer's ideas to issues that psychiatrists and others struggle with today.
Now I finally feel that I understand Meyer and the many ways that breathing that Meyerian air in my youth influenced my life.

[Mills College Library]

616.89 L2189 2014