Rockefeller Foundation

“In short, the RF’s vision of biomedicine was not an exemplar of the reductionistic ideal, but a holistic model in which matters of psyche were placed on a par with those of soma; the laboratory was to be intimately linked to issues that arose in the clinic and the broader society; and experimental method was itself broadly construed. The laboratory was essential to the Rockefeller enterprise – but it was understood on terms quite different from today’s vision of bioscience (Pressman, 190). . . . In important ways, the triumphant model of laboratory-based medical research that prevails today was built not on top of the RF’s holistic model, but over it” (192). . . . By the time Alan Gregg took over control of the RF Medical Sciences program in the 1930s, a distinctly American school of psychiatry had emerged. As articulated by Adolf Meyer, the grand architect of the model, and put into practice by Thomas Salmon, director of the Army neuropsychiatry program in World War I, a new medical specialty [psychiatry] arose that joined the urban neurologist and the asylum alienist in a common enterprise; this was defined not around a reductionistic model of mental illness but rather by a holistic model of mental disorder in which problems of psyche and soma were functionally defined in terms of a citizen’s performance in society, and thus brought together (200) . . . In sum at the Rockefeller Foundation, the new science of man was not reductionistic molecular biology, but psychobiology and psychosomatic medicine – the holistic study of the entire organism, based on many disciplines ranging from anatomy to psychology and anthropology” (201-202).