Meyer, Adolf

   (1866–1950)

   Meyer, who was German-Swiss, introduced to the United States a number of European concepts and helped train the leadership of American psychiatry in the interwar years.

   Born in Niederweningen, Switzerland, into the family of a Protestant minister, Meyer earned his M.D. from the University of Zurich in 1892, immediately immigrating to the United States. After teaching briefly in the neurology department of the University of Chicago, Meyer served as pathologist at a number of mental hospitals: the Illinois Eastern Hospital for the Insane at Kankakee (1893–1895); the Worcester, Massachusetts, Insane Hospital (1895–1902); and as director of the Pathological (later Psychiatric) Institute of the New York State Hospitals. After teaching psychiatry at Cornell University Medical School in New York City from 1904 to 1909, in 1909 he became professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University, then the most prestigious American medical school, and director of the newly opened Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic, from which posts he retired in 1941.

   Meyer played an influential role in psychiatry for several reasons: he helped train a number of prominent U.S. psychiatrists; he also brought over as postdoctoral fellows on Rockefeller Foundation money some rising British psychiatrists, such as Aubrey Lewis. From 1913 to 1915, David K. Henderson (1884–1965), later professor of psychiatry at Edinburgh, was Meyer’s first chief resident. (Meyer was close friends with Alan Gregg [1890–1957], the director of the medical sciences program at Rockefeller, and it was evidently at Gregg’s behest that bright overseas fellows were channeled to Baltimore.) As part of his "psychobiological" orientation, Meyer preached that the entire patient had to be addressed; he called psychobiology "ergasiology" and derived his own nosology, including such terms as "merergasias" and "kakergasias." After an initial flirtation with the Kraepelinian system, Meyer insisted that the illnesses of patients had to be understood in terms of distinctive "reactions" to their own personal problems. For Meyer, all psychiatric problems were reactions, or unsuccessful adjustment patterns, and this language surfaced again in DSM-I (1952). Meyer later became enthusiastic about psychoanalysis and was one of the founders in 1911 of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Leo Alexander (1905–1985), an early American biological psychiatrist then at Duke University, said somewhat wryly in 1958, "I believe that Adolf Meyer cut the Gordian knot a bit prematurely when he denied altogether that mental illnesses are diseases and instead visualized all of them as ‘reactions’ " (Objective Approaches to Treatment in Psychiatry, p. 4).