Biological Psychiatry, Beginning of in United States

   (1946)

   In 1946 at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, two California neurologists—Johannes M. Nielsen (1890–1969, professor of neurology at the University of Southern California) and his student George N. Thompson (1909–?), chief psychiatrist at the Los Angeles General Hospital)—organized a meeting of a select group of investigators interested in "the biological basis of behavior"; from this meeting emerged the Society of Biological Psychiatry. Among those chartering the new society were Percival Bailey (1892–1973), a Chicago neurologist who had studied in Paris and was among other things attending neuropsychiatrist at Presbyterian Hospital; Karl M. Bowman (1888–1973), on staff at the Langley Porter clinic in San Francisco and professor of psychiatry at the University of California; Stanley Cobb (1887–1968), professor of neuropathology at Harvard University and psychiatrist-in-chief at the Massachusetts General Hospital; Roland P. Mackay (1900–1968), attending neurologist at the Neuropsychiatric Institute in Chicago; Harry C. Solomon (1889–1982), medical director of the Boston Psychopathic Hospital; and Samuel Bernard Wortis (1904–1969), professor and chair of psychiatry and neurology at New York University School of Medicine. This was the elite of the U.S. neuroscience establishment. In 1947, Nielsen and Thompson published the first textbook of biological psychiatry in the United States, The Engrammes of Psychiatry.

   * An earlier edition entitled Observations on Insanity was published in 1798, but the second edition was so extensively revised as to constitute a new book.