MEDICINE AND PSYCHIATRY, Psy chology in. Although the great power of sug gestion has been recognized from the earliest human times and the powerful influence of the mind on the body somewhat understood for centuries, the medical schools obviously have in general belied their high privilege of studying and then teaching the relations and mutual dependence of body and mind Thei have neglected psychology. It has been a char acteristic of modern scientific medicine that it has integrated inadequately, and therefore been unduly narrow (in this respect) in its range,— these two facts indeed being but natu ral results of the plain over-guidance by the tradition of materialism. And this is strange to the average man and unaccountable to a degree, for the best English and, to a less tent, French attitude was one of adequate and practical realization of the health's frequent dominance by the mind, and the width and depth and misunderstood complexity of the in fluence of that which we designate as mental. John Locke influenced the experience of earls English medicine more than did the materialist Thomas Hobbes; but America somehow nar rowed if it did not its medical heart The practical result of this trend has been a regrettable, not to say surprising, slowness in medical education's recognition that the practi tioner invariably should know the broader rudi ments at least of psychology; have systematic, however brief, acquaintance with the founda tion-principles of the relation of body and mind; and above all be forced to realise, against the old traditional materialistic prejudice, that every patient is mind quite as importantly as body. Every, reader knows this for himself.
Because, in part, of his varied education, the present writer was almost a pioneer in prac tical attempts to correct this particular narrow ness of American medical education, although laboring meanwhile under quite characteristic difficulties, such as the tradition of the schools and lack of time and of funds. To repeat part of an article in Science, 18 years ago (26 July 1901): The education given to the medical student seems in general too grossly materialistic, too somatic. He learns but one side of this two
sided story; from the first year to the fourth, from the dissecting room to the gynecological or otological clinic the routine student sees and hears of muscles and bones, and viscera, sense organs, nerves and vital fluids, but little, unac countably little, of that other aspect of men and women which to these very men and women is their life, while these other, these organs, are but needful instruments of that life's attainment. And their point of view, it need not be said, is also that of philosophy; shift it, and illogical confusion follows. The layman cares little or nothing for his stomach's condition so long as it gives him no pain and takes good care of what his will and his ap petite lead him to supply to it. The woman in search of a happy family life thinks seldom of her reproductive mechanism so long as it gives her healthy children whom she can love. There is something beside cell-built tissue for the gynecologist in charge of an operative case to consider when of two women, alike in vigor, who undergo identical ovariotomies, for ex ample, one goes in three weeks from the hos pital a new woman, cheerful, capable and happy, while the other becomes an hysteric wreck never perhaps to equal her former self in happiness or in health. As every surgeon knows, such differences are met continually and they puzzle him. Why is it that present medical education takes no account of the principles underlying phenomena like this? So far as the student is concerned, the course, four years or three years long, quite ignores in general the emotional and tempera mental factorswhich in one way or another, directly or indirectly, less or more, enter into almost every chronic case and into many of the acute cases which the general practitioner is called upon to treat. Instead of striving to teach the student what conditions underlie men tal habits and idiosyncrasies, medical instruc tors are now content to practically ignore them regardless of possible great benefits to come from their study as psychological data.