Neurology’s Influence on American Psychiatry: 1865–1915

Abstract

Brown discusses a late turn-of-the-twentieth century interaction that played a central role in expanding psychiatry's scope toward what it is today at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It was, as Brown recapitulates, the development of American neurology and German scientific medicine and neuropsychiatry that frightened, yet also encouraged, American psychiatrists to more-neurological views at the close of the nineteenth century. In short, neurologists developed functional, albeit ostensibly physiological, explanations for the class of disorders exemplified by hysteria and neurasthenia, a class regarded as distinct from both neural disorders with a demonstrable organic pathology and malingering. Finally, this chapter addresses other themes critical to understanding American psychiatry's political and nosological evolution to date. These include the impact of both socioeconomic and semiotic factors. Medical and popular "nervous" metaphors for states of mind and behavior go far