Medicine: Meyer of Hopkins

When young Dr. Adolf Meyer arrived in the U. S. from his native Switzerland almost 50 years ago, it was common practice to herd insane patients together like hopeless criminals.

At one of his early jobs, at an asylum on Ward’s Island, kindly Dr. Meyer turned his patients loose, started them weaving baskets, learning old folk dances, thus laying the foundations for occupational therapy. He visited his patients in their homes to observe their everyday life, took Mrs. Meyer along to talk to their families, worked up detailed case records. In this manner they blazed the trail for psychiatric social work, a vital part of psychiatric treatment today. In 1908 he helped Yale-man Clifford Whittingham Beers, who had recently recovered from manic-depressive insanity, start the mental hygiene movement to clean up State institutions, educate the public on insanity.

Last week, at the lively sessions of the American Psychiatric Association in Cincinnati, grey-bearded, 73-year-old Dr. Adolf Meyer, long head of Phipps Psychiatric clinic at Johns Hopkins, was chief sage and arbiter.

Dr. Meyer never adhered to any one school of psychiatry. Instead, he wove together the fruitful contributions of biology, physiology, psychology, neurology into a simple, practical, humane science. His method of treatment was clear and direct: he would talk things over with a patient, work out the history of his illness, outline a program of education based on a stable, comforting daily routine and good hard work.

Dr. Meyer has written some 170 papers and books in long, periodic sentences which loop and wind halfway down the page. To stress the dynamic nature of disease, he invented a new system of classification based on the Greek root erg (from ergon, work). Medical students in his courses, who had to learn such tonguetwisters as ergasiatry (psychiatry), oligergasia (idiocy), merergasia (hysteria), promptly for got them after examinations. Although few understand just what Dr. Meyer says, all his colleagues know what he means. (At a Hopkins celebration once, a student delivered a long speech in Chinese, then announced: “You have just heard a lecture in psychobiology.”)