One Hundred Years of American Psychiatry

The commemoration of the one hundredth anniversary of the American Psychiatric Association has been given concrete form in this large volume. This anniversary is a milestone in American psychiatry for "The history of American psychiatry is the history of the American Psychiatric Association, and the tradition of this Association permeates all the pages which are herewith submitted to the reader. . ." Since the reader is asked to look upon the book as a whole, it may be unfair to consider it in its somewhat unrelated parts which, indeed, is the form in which it is written. The volume consists of 15 separate contributions in addition to the Presentation and Introduction. Its format is beautiful and is a tribute to the art of publishing, despite wartime restrictions. On October 16, 1844, thirteen hospital superintendents met in the Jones Hotel in Philadelphia and formed The Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane, later called The American Medico-Psychological Association, which in turn was to become the American Psychiatric Association. Membership in the organization, for many years restricted to superintendents of asylums, was later broadened to include assistant physicians, and only fairly recently has come to include all psychiatrists or persons with known psychiatric interests. The growth of American psychiatry in these 100 years has been tremendous with respect to the number of institutions and the number of psychiatrists and associated workers. In 1844 there were about 2500 patients in institutions in a population of some 17,000,000 people in the United States, and there were about 20 mental hospitals in the entire country, only three of them west of the Alleghenies. Dorothea Dix had just begun her crusade and the increase in the number of institutions, and the reforms in those already established, during the following two decades were largely due to her extraordinary efforts. As one reads the various chapters, one gets a definite sense of this progress which occurred with few setbacks , despite the various cataclysms which upset American life during the century. Wars, economic depressions, shifting political winds, the rapid expansion of the country-all were taken in stride, so to speak. The growth of mental hospitals is presented in excellent form by Hamilton, the present president-elect of the American Psychiatric Asso