Neurology

“Medical neurology in the postwar decades would no longer be a primary care specialty as it had been for some 75 years previously. Neurologists would leave the ‘nervous’ patients to psychiatrists, surgery to the neurosurgeons, and the ongoing care of other patients to internists or family physicians. They would confine themselves to consulting, teaching, and research. In these roles they would flourish, particularly under the auspices of the National Institutes of Health and of private foundations such as the March of Dimes and the Muscular Dystrophy Association. “Yet something was lost in this process as well. The project integrating the knowledge of mind, brain, and behavior under the rubric of ‘neurology’ was set aside, at least temporarily. To the extent that neurologists continued to strive for a scientific, material understanding of psychological phenomena, their efforts were directed almost exclusively along reductionist lines. In a parallel fashion, psychiatrists who maintained an interest in organic bases (or correlates) of mental disturbance bypassed sophisticated neurological theory in favor of the empirically based use of psychoactive drugs or crude surgical interventions” (Blustein III, 112-113).