Pathologist of the mind : Adolf Meyer and the origins of American psychiatry /

Adolf Meyer was named chief of the department of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University in 1908. During his time at Johns Hopkins, he transformed custodial asylum medicine into a clinical science through the development of the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic, the first-ever clinic devoted to psychiatry. In this fascinating study, Lamb (history and classical studies, McGill Univ.) examines Meyer's efforts to establish psychiatry as a clinical science and subdiscipline of biology between the years 1892 and 1917, and she explores the meaning of psychobiology by examining how Meyer put it into practice at the Phipps Clinic. The first historian to gain access to the clinic's rich archival collection, Lamb offers not a history of the center but rather a historical interpretation of Meyer's early ideas and scientific/therapeutic practices. In the first two chapters, Lamb describes Meyer's biological theories of mind and his crusade to establish psychiatry as a clinical science, beginning in 1892. The remaining chapters explore how Meyer practiced these clinical methods at Johns Hopkins in the clinic and classroom between 1913 and 1918. This book is a medical historian's dream. Summing Up: Essential. All readers. --Margaret L. Charleroy, University of Minnesota