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Page 13
Our thanks and best wishes to those who invited us to stand here to-day
at the cradle of a second century of Bloomingdale Hospital! It is a
noteworthy gathering that joins here in good wishes to those who have
shaped this ever-new Bloomingdale. With a tribute to our thoughtful and
enthusiastic friend in internal medicine, Lewellys F. Barker, to our
English coworker, Richard G. Rows, to the illustrious champion of French
psychopathology, Pierre Janet, to our friend and leader in practical
psychiatry, William L. Russell, to our friends and coworkers of the
Bloomingdale staff, and especially also to the Board of Governors who
shape the policy and control the finances, and exercise the leadership
of public opinion, I herewith express my sincerest thanks and best
wishes.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 2: A Guide to the Descriptive Study of the Personality, with
Special Reference to the Taking of Anamneses of Cases with Psychoses, by
Dr. August Hoch and Dr. George S. Amsden.]
[Footnote 3: See, for instance, Moebius, The Hopelessness of All
Psychology, reviewed in the Psychological Bulletin, vol. IV, 1907, pp.
170-179.]
ADDRESS BY
DR. LEWELLYS F. BARKER
_The Chairman_:--The Johns Hopkins Medical School lends us also to-day
Dr. Lewellys F. Barker, its Professor of Clinical Medicine. Dr. Barker
has done so much to define and settle the contradictions of mind and
matter, and has clarified so much, and in fields so varied, as teacher,
research worker, and practitioner, that we welcome this opportunity of
listening to his discussion of "THE IMPORTANCE OF PSYCHIATRY IN GENERAL
MEDICAL PRACTICE."
DR. BARKER
We have met to-day to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the
founding of a hospital that, in its simpler beginnings and in its
evolution to the complex and highly organized activities of the present,
has served an eminently practical purpose and has played an important
r�le in the development of the science and art of psychiatry in America.
I desire, as a representative of general medicine, and, especially, of
internal medicine, to add, on this occasion, my congratulations to those
of the spokesmen of other groups, and, at the same time to express the
hope that this institution, historically so significant for the century
just past, may maintain its relative influence and reputation in the
centuries to come.
The interest taken in psychiatry by the general practitioner and by the
consulting internist has been growing rapidly of late. Some of the
reasons for this growth of interest and heightening of appreciation I
have drawn attention to on an earlier occasion.[4] Psychiatry as a whole
was for a long time as widely separated from general medicine as
penology is to-day, and for similar reasons. It was a long time before
persons that manifested extraordinary abnormalities of thought, feeling,
and behavior were regarded as deserving medical study and care, and even
when a humanitarian movement led to their transfer from
straight-jackets, chains, and prison cells to "asylums for the insane,"
these institutions were, for practical reasons, so divorced from the
homes of the people and from general hospitals that psychiatry had, and
could at the time have, but little intercourse with general medicine or
with general society. Mental disorders were moral and legal problems
rather than biological, social, and medical problems. Their genesis was
wholly misunderstood, and legal, medical, social, religious, and
philosophic prejudices went far toward preventing any rational
scientific mode of approach to the questions involved or any formulation
of investigative procedures that promised to be fruitful. Even to-day
the same prejudices are all too inhibitory; but thanks to the
unprecedented development of the natural sciences during the period
since this hospital was founded, we are witnessing, in our time, a rapid
transformation of thought and opinion concerning both the normal and the
disordered mind, a transformation that is reaching all circles of human
beings, bidding fair to compel the strongholds of tradition and
prejudice to relax, and inviting the whole-hearted co-operation of
workers in all fields in a common task of overcoming some of the
greatest difficulties by which civilization and human progress are
confronted. And though the brunt of this task is borne and must be borne
by the shoulders of medical men, physicians assume the burden
cheerfully, now that they know that they can count upon the intelligent
support and the cordial sympathy of an ever-enlarging extra-medical
aggregate. No better illustration could be given, perhaps, of the change
in the status of psychiatry in this country and in the world than the
contents of the programme of our meeting to-day at which a distinguished
investigator from London tells us of the biological significance of
mental disorders, an eminent authority from Paris explains the
relationship between certain diseases of the nervous system and these
disorders, and a leading psychiatrist of this country speaks upon the
contributions of psychiatry to the understanding of the problems of
life. Psychiatry, like each of the other branches of medicine, has come
to be recognized as one of the subdivisions of the great science of
biology, free to make use of the scientific method, in duty bound to
diffuse the knowledge that it gains, and privileged to contribute
abundantly to the lessening of human suffering and the enhancement of
human joys. General practitioners of medicine and medical
specialists--at least the more enlightened of them--welcome the
developing science of psychiatry, are eager to hasten its progress, and
will gladly share in applying its discoveries to the early diagnosis,
the cure, and the prevention of disease.
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