Too often is the medical man the most ma terialistic-minded member of a community, when his view should he much deeper, into the controlling forces of life. This is the natural outcome when in a long medical course no part of the individual is shown to the student ex cept what he can feel with his hands or see through the microscope. Yet how commonplace is the assertion that the man, the real man or woman, is not his or her body, hut the will, affections, habits, character, of the individual, while (what is more immediate to our argu ment) these same aspects of consciousness are often the direct molders, or destroyers of dis ease and, as one side of an inseparable psycho physical organism, have more control or influ ence over the functions purely somatic than the average practitioner of medicine appreciates. Not mind controlling body nor body controlling mind, but both together always sensitive to the stimuli of a common environment, combined into the actual individual.
The whole trend of modern biologic sci ence is toward the appreciation that neither factor of personality, body or mind, in justice to the medical student and through him to the public may be longer ignored.
Agreeably to such convictions, the catalogue of the Tufts College Medical School of 1900— 01 contained announcement of a course in uNormal Medical Psychology' This was con tinued for nine years, when by arrangement with Prof. Morton Prince, it was developed into a course termed 'Psychopathology and Psycho therapeutics?) In 1912 (for lack of funds to pay the lecturers) the psychological work was abandoned. Such a record of pioneer develop ment in medical curriculum is instructive in several respects to all of who believe that a physician should realize that his patients have minds influential to a degree at present quite indefinable but more and more appreciated. So far as known, the johns Hopkins medical department alone preceded in the practical and systematic realization of this basal fact.
The slowness with which adequate courses in normal medical psychology are made re quired parts of medical curricula, is another depressing sign of the essential narrowness of the average professional outlook into life and philosophy, just as it is another evidence that medicine is for some of its practitioners still largely a trade wherein no facts are either of interest or desirable, no breadth of view admit table, that has not a bank-note or its equivalent closely attached. Hasten the progressive day when without the broadening education of the college bachelor's course at least no man or woman shall be allowed for gain to take charge of the human personality of a fellow mortal! For without his psychology he knows only about half of the being whom he pretends thoroughly to understand.
The reasons in particular for this insistent need of psychology in medical education the writer already in part has summarized in an article in the New York Medical Record of 30 Jan., 1909.
The Physician's Need of Psychology.— The most obvious and immediate need for sys tematic medical psychology comes, of course, from psychiatry and neurology. That the de mand does not come even more insistently than it does from the teachers of these subjects, especially of the former, is one of the anomalies of the whole matter. When one does not ex pect a student to understand the deranged movements of the heart who has never seen a healthy heart or a representation of one, why should the multitude of third- and fourth-year men who know nothing of the processes of perception and imagination he expected to com prehend an hallucination? Or those who have never been told of the mechanism of the emo tion of fear to understand the depression and misery of melancholia? One asks too much in expecting any man to really comprehend a case of paranoia who has no notion of the processes of ideation. And neurasthenia, the bread-and butter malady to practitioners of nervous dis ease, does any suppose it is not so intertwined with mental relationships that to unravel it in full is to make use inevitably of no little various and intricate psychology? The modern variants of the crest cure" require a knowledge of the motor relationships of the mind, and else this valuable system of retraining the mind back to health through controlled voluntary use of the muscles would lose much of its precision and basal usefulness.
In a less technical way, perhaps, but quite as importantly in the long run, the surgeon as a surgeon needs to be familiar with mental processes. It is especially important that he should realize the often surprising life-length ening support and stimulation, technically called dynamogeny, that belongs to the joyful emotions. Scarcely less useful oftentimes, ex plain it as one may, is the vitalizing influence of determination, of vigorously expressed will to thrive and to live. Aristotle and John Hun ter down to the latest of them all agree in ad mitting these facts, however the future science of normal medical psychology shall in detail interpret and explain them. Does the sceptic (if such, perchance,, persist into these clatter days") know of a single really great surgeon who does not inevitably inspire the almost per fect confidence of every patient under his care? Can the master-surgeon actually cut us up in variably so much better than his struggling neighbor in the next block uptown? Or is his far. greater success due in part to his exaction of confidence in his knowledge of human nature as really it is—mind as well as body,— giving us confidence and so inspiring hope and all the guarding and reparative powers of pleasant and stimulating emotion? The physiology and psychology of this important influence we now fairly well understand.