Psychiatry’s Most Misunderstood Founding Father: Adolf Meyer

Adolf Meyer (1866-1950) exercised unparalleled influence over the development of American psychiatry during the twentieth century—intellectually, professionally, and publicly. The biological concepts and clinical methods he implemented and taught at his prominent Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins between 1910 and 1941 remain significant to psychiatric practice and neuroscientific research, and to public perceptions of mental health and illness today. Meyer’s person-centered theories spark heated controversy within American psychiatry today; are psychiatric disorders to be considered disease or non-normative character traits? Join Professor Susan Lamb, author of Pathologist of the Mind: Adolf Meyer and the Origins of American Psychiatry (Johns Hopkins, 2014), to rediscover psychiatry’s most misunderstood founding father.

About the Speaker

Dr. Susan Lamb is the Jason A. Hannah Chair in History of Medicine at the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Medicine. Her scholarly interests span the history of medicine, across time and its diverse subject matter, and her research program includes work on the historical development of university medicine and medical education, digital history, psychiatry, nursing, and global health and disease. A Canadian, she obtained her Ph.D. from the Institute of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins in 2010. In addition to her monograph on Adolf Meyer, she has published several scholarly articles in peer-reviewed journals.