1904

Thomas Salmon, who received commission by USPH & Marine Hospital Service (= USPHS in 1912) in 1903, arrives at Ellis Island: “to a physician like Salmon the challenge of practicing diagnostic psychiatry at Ellis Island was just the kind he enjoyed. . . . he insisted that medical inspection become a more thorough procedure because he, like so many psychiatrists, believed that many insane aliens were slipping past the guardians of the nation’s borders” (Dowbiggin II, 203, 204). “Predictably Salmon was demoted from Ellis Island to the Boston Marine Hospital,” but his career was saved by admiring NY State mental health care officials and he was offered position of chief medical examiner of the Board of Alienists in NY State in 1911 (205). For most of the pre-WWI period, William Alanson White “supported efforts to improve medical inspection and facilitate deportation of insane aliens; like most psychiatrists of the time, he subscribed to the link between criminality and insanity on the basis of the mental degeneracy of many immigrants (206). “Salmon’s public views on immigration, a mixture of humanitarianism, professional partisanship, and uncritical and ill-informed opinions about national tendencies toward mental illness, closely mirrored those of psychiatrists generally (217). . . . Salmon’s views were far from systematic or consistent, except when it came to psychiatrists’ hegemony over medical inspection of aliens. Like other psychiatrists, he mainly wanted this field free of any influence extraneous to pure psychiatry, especially pressure brought to bear on politicians by steamship companies. To him psychiatrists were locked in a struggle with ‘the interests’ that often poisoned the health of countless innocent men, women, and children, including immigrants; it was a battle in defense of humane values and sentiments” (219).