1912

Opening of Boston Psychopathic Hospital under directorship of E. E. Southard; a group of men (Myerson, Lowrey, Solomon, etc.) “who were collectively and determinedly forging a new professional persona for the psychiatrist as a worldly man of science” (Lunbeck, 11-12, 20-24; quote at 28). More than half of patients to Boston Psychopathic Hospital during its first decade were admitted under provisions of various “temporary laws,” according to which patients “were denied any ground on which to protest unwanted confinement,” and their appeal to the law was at work a sign of disease (“litigation psychosis”). Believing that legal niceties stood in the way of psychiatry’s progress, their refusal to entertain rights-based arguments “was at bottom a corollary of their enmeshment within a disciplinary paradigm, according to the conventions of which talk of rights – linked as it was to their discipline’s sorry history – was inadmissible.” Under the temporary laws, “the power to police took multiple forms,” allowing a range of persons – disgruntled husbands, frightened wives, exasperated mothers, annoyed neighbors – to play the police officer’s part (Lunbeck, 89-96). At Boston Psychopathic, 26% of all patients were diagnosed with dementia praecox, 11% manic-depressive, 10% alcoholic, and 8% suffering from the effects of syphilis (120). Psychiatrists’ use of term “psychotherapy” usually meant “persuasive talk,” although they hired a Freudian psychologist, L. Eugene Emerson, to conduct psychotherapy. In point of fact, talk became therapeutic “through the medium of the social worker, not the psychiatrist” (178-179).