Fortunately for anyone wishing to learn about Meyer's ideas and their influence, Lamb, a historian, has mined his unpublished papers and correspondence for the truths that became opaque when he turned them into essays. Crucially, she has also read more than 1,800 of the meticulous patient records that Meyer and his staff created at the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic, which reveal ... Read morehim at work as a clinician and teacher. These she presents as the key to understanding how he created an American psychiatry with his ideas at its center. The result is a tutorial in Meyer's psychobiology, and a fascinating look at patients' experiences, their suffering, and treatment in the early 20th century.
Ben Harris PsycCRITIQUES In this fascinating study, Lamb examines Meyer's efforts to establish psychiatry as a clinical science and subdiscipline of biology... This book is a medical historian's dream. Choice Pathologist of the Mind: Adolf Meyer and the Origins of American Psychiatry by Dr. S. D. Lamb... is a book full of interesting information on how Dr. Adolf Meyer, a Swiss neurologist and psychiatrist, set the basis for modern psychiatry in the United States.
Marina Oppenheimer Metapsychology ... [Lamb] aims to give us a more detailed and rounded portrait of Meyer's life and career, and... has contributed some valuable and original material about Meyer's early activities at the Phipps Clinic. Times Literary Supplement Pathologist of the Mind clarifies Meyerian notions of psychobiology, psychotherapy, and evolutionary theory (among others) and places this important figure, as well as the hospital and area of specialty to which he was dedicated, into historical context. In impressively detailed fashion, the book brings the man and the era to life. Cheiron Book Prize Citation Some books are worth underlining every sentence. Susan D. Lamb's book, Pathologist of the Mind: Adolf Meyer and the Origins of American Psychiatry is one of them. Psychiatric Services Show Less