Constitutional Medicine

“The connection the Rockefeller and Macy foundations drew between Draper’s work in constitutional medicine and the approach of psychosomatically oriented clinicians such as Dunbar and Smith Ely Jelliffe was clear. Draper’s, Dunbar’s, and Jelliffe’s work, along with that of the psychiatrists Adolf Meyer and William A. White, represented the holistic, organismic perspective in psychiatry and clinical medicine, a perspective whose popularity seemed to peak between 1930 and 1940, and one that brought into medical and psychological parlance such phrases as ‘the organism as a whole,’ ‘the organism and its environment,’ and ‘the mind-body unity.’ The research of Draper, Dunbar, Jelliffe, Meyer, and White, ‘organismic, psychobiologic, constitutional, and character-analytic,’ stressed ‘wholes, correlations, configurations and constellations,’ but rarely cause” (Tracy II, 81).