Psychiatr News January 5, 2007
Volume 42, Number 1, page 26
© 2007 American Psychiatric Association
American Psychiatry and the Surgeon General's Library: 1850–1900
Lucy D. Ozarin, M.D., M.P.H.
The National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Md., is the largest medical
library in the world. It had its beginnings in the early 1800s when Army
medical officers received a few medical books to assist them.
Over the years, U.S. surgeons general continued the practice and
accumulated a small collection of medical books in their offices. The major
impetus to the growth of the library followed the 1865 appointment of an Army
assistant surgeon, John Shaw Billings (1838–1913), who had served in the
Civil War, to oversee the growing collection. Billings procured books and
other medical publications from domestic and foreign sources and compiled
catalogs and bibliographies for public use. He sent out requests for medical
publications worldwide, which resulted in thousands of medical reprints of
published articles being received. Most came from the United States, Great
Britain, France, Germany, and Italy, but other countries were also
represented. The Army Medical Library became the National Library of Medicine
in 1956, and those early reprints are now stored in the Bethesda library.
The reprints are being screened using the book Morton's Medical
Bibliography, an annotated list now in its fifth edition, illustrating
the history of medicine. Reprints and authors listed in the book are being
catalogued to be placed in the library collection. The reprints, in the main,
cover the period 1850–1900.
The collection includes reprints of psychiatric subjects, many of which
were published in the American Journal of Insanity (AJI, now
the American Journal of Psychiatry). Isaac Ray, one of the founders
of the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the
Insane (AMSAII) and the foremost forensic psychiatrist of his time,
contributed a reprint titled "Confinement of the Insane"
(American Law Review, 1869); John P. Gray, superintendent of Utica
(N.Y.) State Hospital and editor of AJI for 32 years, published an
article on heredity (AJI, 1884); Thomas Kirkbride, also a founder of
the AMSAII, and creator of the plan that was followed in the construction of
most public mental hospitals of the 19th century, wrote a memoir of
Ray after his death (Pa. Transactions, 1881); Edward Cowles,
superintendent of the McLean Mental Hospital in Massachusetts, published an
article titled "Insistent and Fixed Ideas" (American Journal
of Psychology, 1880); Henry Hurd, superintendent of Eastern Michigan
State Hospital in Pontiac and later first superintendent of the John Hopkins
Hospital in Baltimore, wrote "A Plea for Systematic Therapeutical
Clinical and Statistical Study" (AJI, 1881); Edward Jarvis, the
first psychiatrist-epidemiologist and consultant to the U.S. Census Bureau,
published "Immigration in the U.S." (Atlantic Monthly,
1874).
Women psychologists and psychiatrists are also represented. Jennie McCowen,
assistant physician at the State Hospital in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, and a
former president of the Scott County Medical Society, wrote "On Insanity
in Women" (Iowa Medical Society Transactions, 1886); Alice
Bennett, one of the first women in the United States to obtain a Ph.D. and
superintendent of Norristown (Pa.) State Hospital, published "Periodic
Insanity" (Medical Legal Journal, 1888); Mary Putnam Jacobi
wrote "The Prophylaxis of Insanity" (Archives of
Medicine, 1881).
Neurologists of the period who considered themselves qualified to treat
psychiatric conditions were bitterly critical of AMSAII and the
superintendents and published many articles on psychiatric subjects. William
Hammond, a Civil War surgeon general and founder and president of the American
Neurological Association, wrote "The Non-Asylum Treatment of the
Insane" (Transaction of the New York Medical Society, 1879);
George Beard, a New York neurologist and coiner of the term
"neurasthenia," wrote "On Certain Symptoms of Nervous
Exhaustion" (Virginia Medical Monthly, 1878); Edouard Seguin, a
French émigré and authority on education of
"feebleminded" children, wrote four pamphlets on lunacy reform
(Archives of Medicine, 1880), and S. Weir Mitchell, an American
Neurological Association president, delivered a scathing article on the
members of AMSAII at their annual meeting in 1894 (AJI, 1894).
Morton's book lists 12 annotations for S. Weir Mitchell, seven for Benjamin
Rush, two for Isaac Ray, one for Henry Hurd, one for Hammond, three for Beard,
one for Seguin. Few other American psychiatrists are cited. 
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