Background

Adolf Meyer was born on September 13, 1866, in the parish house at Niederweningen, a farming village about five miles from Zurich, Switzerland. He was the oldest son and second of three children of Rudolf Meyer and Anna (Walder) Meyer. Adolf's grandfather Rudolf Meyer, a potter, stove builder, and local surveyor, surveyed and rented the Katzenrütihof, farmed until then by Kleinjogg's son. Adolf's cousin later married Kleinjogg's grandson.

Education

Adolf Meyer attended the Gymnasium and the university faculty of medicine in Zurich. An excellent student in all but composition, he achieved recognition in his third year at the Gymnasium for an autobiography which substituted an account of his attitudes and feelings for the usual chronology of events.

At the university he was attracted to the vivacious clinical demonstrations of Auguste Forel, chairman of psychiatry. He was influenced also by Constantin von Monakow, who taught the anatomy of the brain more as neurobiology, i. e. , life-oriented, than as neuro-physiology, i. e. , cell- or organ-oriented. In 1890, after passing the examination to practice medicine, Meyer, who had avidly studied French and English in school, took a Wanderjahr of medical studies in Paris, Edinburgh, and London on funds from a fellowship and from his father. He studied with Jean-Baptiste Charcot, Pierre Potain, Jean Alfred Fournier, John Simon, George Dieulafoy, and Joseph Jules Déjerine and learned of constitutional types, neglected by the Germans in favor of the study of tissue diseases and infective agents. He attended Byrom Bramwell's clinical presentations in Edinburgh. Although uninterested in practicing psychiatry, he included the organization of the care of mental patients in Scotland in his report Medizinische Studien in Paris, Edinburgh, and London (1891), his first publication. He received his doctorate in 1892 with a thesis on the forebrain of reptiles, "Über das Vorderhirn einiger Reptilien. "

Career

At the National Hospital in London, ward rounds with J. Taylor and clinical visits with Hughlings Jackson gave Meyer experience with neurological diseases, including epilepsy, hysteria, brain tumors, and tabes dorsalis. He observed Victor Horsley's surgical procedures involving the central nervous system. Throughout his career Meyer continued laboratory studies on aphasia and on the occipital lobe, making a number of fundamental contributions to neuroanatomy and neuropathology, including the discovery of the temporallobe detour of the optic radiations (which he named Meyer's loop) and the introduction of plasticine models into the teaching of neuroanatomy. His encounter with the biological comprehensiveness of British thought, particularly that of Huxley and Hughlings Jackson, which contrasted with the cell and organ orientation on the Continent was extremely influential in his work. Among Huxley's contributions, Meyer acknowledged his definition of science as "organized common sense, " for which Meyer fought in psychiatry; his "presentation of Darwin and Hume with a tendency to give a biological background to the human problem" and his "extreme version of parallelism which made of mind a mere epiphenomenon a theory which later I had to reintegrate to get my full satisfaction" (Fourteenth Maudsley Lecture). These theories, together with Hughlings Jackson's "broad and inclusive concept of the hierarchy of evolution and dissolution processes, with a distinctive psychological level, called for correlations with my comparative neurological and neuropathological work and my personal human interest in the causal efficiency of suggestion and mentation generally in psychiatry".

In London, Meyer watched William R. Gowers at his dispensary for epileptics take case histories in shorthand to avoid missing anything. Painstakingly detailed case histories along with autobiographies became the marks of Meyerian training. He returned to Zurich inspired by Gowers' accurate and clear textbook on the anatomy of the spinal cord to attempt a doctoral thesis (under Forel) which would do the same for the brain. When he was not appointed assistant to the professor of medicine at Zurich, Meyer decided to pursue his career in the United States, for the alternative of Swiss private practice seemed too limiting. After five months at Vienna and Berlin medical centers and a month with the Déjerines in Paris, he revisited Edinburgh, where he met an American colleague, Henry H. Donaldson, with whom he had studied under von Monakow. Donaldson secured for him an unpaid honorary fellowship (1892 - 1893) at the new University of Chicago. After a year in this position, Meyer obtained a docentship teaching neurology and brain anatomy. In 1893 he introduced the functional study of the nervous system and in 1895, a three-dimensional developmental anatomy. In 1898 his classic "Critical Review of the Data and General Methods and Deductions of Modern Neurology" was published; it contained the essence of his integrative theory and the nucleus of his psychobiological doctrine.

When he left Switzerland, his mother, previously eminently sensible and sane, suffered the delusion he was dead and sank into a severe depression. Her recovery in spite of Forel's hopeless prognosis made Meyer skeptical about disease entities and prognostications. He became process oriented. He interviewed patients about their lives, and in so doing discovered much of why they had become ill. At Kankakee, he met Julia Lathrop of the Board of Charities and Correction, later first head of the Federal Children's Bureau, who introduced him to Hull House and Jane Addams.

A lasting intellectual companionship also started when John Dewey came from Michigan to Chicago in 1894. Another important influence was his exposure to the writings of Charles Peirce and William James, who also rejected the mind-body dichotomy. Meyer directed the setting up of the Illinois State Pathological Laboratory, organized the medical workers into the Association of Assistant Physicians of Hospitals for the Insane, and wrote the opening article for the new journal of the Illinois Association for Child Study. Meyer's presentation of brain sections from epilepsy cases at the 1895 American Medico-Psychological Association meeting in Denver so impressed Edward Cowles that he invited Meyer to help make the State Lunatic Hospital in Worcester, in connection with Clark University, a training school in nervous diseases. In his new position, Meyer stressed careful study of patients' symptoms and needs, using the nearby laboratory as a staff center, "not a mere mortuary nor a scientific side show". He introduced bedside note-taking and trained his assistants in case taking, accurate concise recording, and uniform methods of intake examinations. He became clinical director, covering the entire hospital weekly in regular rounds. At Clark, he put the clinical demonstrations of symptom complexes on a biological basis. He opened psychiatry to psychologists; his students were among the creators of the profession of clinical psychology. In 1896 Meyer visited at Turin with Cesare Lombroso, who was making a doctrine of "degeneracy, " and the physiologist Angelo Mosso, who wrote on fear. After six weeks at Emil Kraepelin's small Heidelberg hospital, he introduced in the United States Kraepelin's system of classification of the manic-depressive and schizophrenic groups of mental disease. He considered this an improvement on the old system, but had serious misgivings that nosology distracted from the patients' individual constitutions and experiences.

In 1902, hoping to establish a psychopathic hospital for voluntary commitment of early stage cases, Frederick Peterson, the newly appointed president of the New York State Commission on Lunacy, invited Meyer to become director of the Pathological Institute in New York City. Meyer transformed the insane asylums into mental hospitals. He taught the established descriptive psychiatry but opened the minds of physicians, such as Abraham Brill, to the promises of dynamic psychiatry. Autopsies failed to sustain the theory of lesions in the nervous system except in profound idiocy, general paralysis, and senile and organic dementia; insanity, Meyer argued, was a pathology not of the brain but of mental functioning. After he moved the institute to Ward's Island, where the Manhattan State Hospital afforded opportunity to relate clinical observation and pathological study, his wife began visiting patients and discussing cases with him. At his suggestion, she made visits to the homes of patients and obtained a clearer view of events in patients' lives and an awareness of what awaited them on release. Meyer fought for guidance for afflicted families and for continued hospital contact after discharge; in 1906 the State Commission on Lunacy approved such an aftercare system. Mary then turned to Adolf's other therapeutic concerns: recreation and occupational therapy. As professor of clinical medicine (psychopathology) at Cornell Medical College (1904 - 1909), Meyer organized an outpatient service, the first mental clinic in the city; he was assisted by George H. Kirby, C. Macfie Campbell, and later by August Hoch. He also taught at Columbia University, where he presented psychology as "a study of the determining factors of the stream of mental life" and described consciousness as "an integrate of the person, not only the brain. " In May 1913 Phipps opened an inpatient service and also a dispensary under C. Macfie Campbell which included a child-guidance clinic. In 1914 he introduced psychology into the curriculum, eventually extending it to the full four years. In 1928 he called for a specialty board. Meyer died of a cerebral hemorrhage at his home on Rugby Road in Baltimore, Maryland, and is buried in Druid Ridge Cemetery in Pikesville, Maryland.

Achievements

• Adolf Meyer has been listed as a noteworthy psychiatrist, neurologist. by Marquis Who's Who.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Aphasia

    (Article first published in 1905 in which Adolf Meyer disc...)

  • de Meyer

    (Adolf de Meyer's camera defined the beauty and elegance o...)

  • The Commonsense Psychiatry Of Dr. Adolf Meyer: Fifty-Two Selected Papers, With Biographical Narrative

    (This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)

  • State of New York State Hospitals Bulletin, Vol. 2: 1909-1910 (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from State of New York State Hospitals Bulletin, ...)

  • State Hospitals Bulletin, Vol. 1: Published Four Times a Year by Authority of the State Commission in Lunacy; May, 1908 (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from State Hospitals Bulletin, Vol. 1: Published ...)

Views

Adolf grew up in an atmosphere of liberalism and reflection. The religion of his father, a Zwinglian minister, had its origins in life, enriched but not dogmatized by the Bible. This tolerance allowed a naturally curious and open-minded youth contact with Catholic and Jewish communities in adjoining cantons. In his father's library, Adolf read the works of Lange and Wundt as well as Eduard von Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious; he relied on his impressions of his father's thoughts about imponderables like death rather than ask openly. At confirmation he accepted the creed muttering under his breath "If that is so. " The family considered themselves the spiritual heirs of the eighteenth-century folk-philosopher Kleinjogg (Jakob Gujer), a peasant who successfully dared break with ancient customs and government prescriptions to follow his own observations and reasoning. Kleinjogg believed that psychology and biology were a unity "the reform of the farm" must begin "with the moral reform of its inhabitants. " Concerned with developing healthy, happy people, he anticipated important principles of modern mental hygiene. Example was essential to all teaching and parental example to the rearing of children, which he regarded as the distinctive characteristic of the human race, to become happy, skillful adults.

Adolf Meyer chose medicine as his profession, because he believed the ministry dealt with only a part of man. He was more interested "in the man that I can know than in man the unknown. " The "acceptance of this emphasis on what counted in a person impressed on him the value of a biographical sketch in getting at the core of an individual", a method he introduced into psychiatric training.

After a year of private neurological practice, he assumed, with the aid of Dr. Ludwig Hektoen, a post as pathologist at the new Illinois Eastern Hospital for the Insane at Kankakee (1893 - 1895). He tried to introduce the ideas on psychotherapy he had first presented in February 1893 to the Chicago Pathological Society. He proposed that pathologists should go beyond the laboratory into the wards, "getting the patient to do things, and getting the things going which did not work but which could with proper straightening out, " i. e. , occupational therapy. In Child Study Monthly (1895), he spoke out against the overemphasis on hereditary factors, recognizing that children of abnormal parents are "exposed from birth to acquire unconsciously habits of a morbid character. "

Meyer added the classification of ergasias, mentally integrated functions or behaviors of the individual. In 1897 his psychobiological concept that physiological-anatomical development and mental development are one development from one cell was a revelation. At Clark's decennial celebration, Meyer's departmental report of psychopathology looked toward closer integration of psychopathology looked toward closer integration of psychology and biology. He launched the idea of a psychiatric clinic and research station established jointly by the state and university and envisioned psychiatry protecting the healthy by appraising the potentialities and dangers in a person's mode of living and providing proper direction.

Meyer recognized that schools and communities as well as families were sources of mental illness and health. By then the leading psychiatrist in the United States, Meyer helped Clifford Beers establish and name the mental hygiene movement. Meyer suggested essential changes in Beers' autobiography, A Mind that Found Itself.

Meyer believed that psychiatry and sociology should understand the functionings of the community, but he could obtain only enough support to survey a single school population.

Quotations: "I have decided to study the whole of man. "

"I decided to work pragmatically with the best possible use of critical commonsense to put aside all preconceived traditional classification to take the facts and group them without adulteration or suppression of any available data".

“The goal of medicine is peculiarly, the goal of making itself unneccessary: of influencing life so that what is medicine today becomes mere commonsense tomorrow. ”

Membership

a charter member of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene

Personality

Aside from his many contributions to psychiatry, Meyer was a fascinating human being. He cultivated an air of inscrutability, reinforced both by his bearded, somewhat owlish countenance and by his unfamiliarity, despite his long residency in the United States, with many American expressions. This sometimes led to his misunderstanding of what his patients were saying. His anxiety to present all sides of complicated questions made him a terrible committee man. Meyer's university lectures were so intricately subtle that at least one student helped support himself by selling typed summaries "translated" into plain Engilsh. Yet no one could meet him without feeling in the presence of a great man.

Connections

On September 15, 1902, Meyer married Mary Potter Brooks, a pioneer in psychiatric social work; they had one daughter, Julia Lathrop.

Father:

Rudolf Meyer

Mother:

Anna (Walder) Meyer

Grandfather:

Rudolf Meyer

References

• The Commonsense psychiatry of Dr. Adolf Meyer
• Commonsense Psychiatry of Dr. Adolf Meyer Fifty-Two Selected Papers Edited, with Biographical Narrartive.
• Pathologist of the Mind: Adolf Meyer and the Origins of American Psychiatry