A Psychiatric Milestone: Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921
History
A Psychiatric Milestone: Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921
Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane; Mental illness
It is natural enough that man should want to travel on the road he knows
and likes best. The philosopher uses his logic and analysis and
synthesis. The introspectionist wants to get at the riddle of the
universe by crawling into the innermost depth of his own self-scrutiny,
even at the risk--to use a homely phrase--of drawing the hole in after
him and losing all connection with the objective world. The physicist
follows the reverse course. He gives us the appreciation of the
objective world around and in us. The chemist follows out the analytic
and synthetic possibilities of his atoms and elements, and the biologist
the growth and reproduction and multiplication of cells. Each sees an
open world of possibilities and is ready to follow as far as facts will
carry and as far as the imagination will soar. Each branch has created
its rules of the game culminating in the concept of objective science,
and the last set of facts to bring itself under the rules of objective
science, and to be accepted, has been man as a unit and personality.
The mind and soul of man have indeed had a hard time. To this day,
investigators have suffered under the dogma that mind must be treated as
purely subjective entity, something that can be studied only by
introspection, or at least only with ultra-accurate instruments--always
with the idea that common sense is all wrong in its psychology.
Undoubtedly it was, so long as it spoke of a mind and soul as if what
was called so had to be, even during life, mysterious and inaccessible,
something quite different from any other fact of natural-history study.
The great step was taken when all of life was seen again in its broad
relations, without any special theory but frankly as common sense finds
it, viz., as the activities and behavior of definite individuals--very
much as Aristotle had put it--"living organisms in their 'form' or
activity and behavior." Psychology had to wake up to studying other
minds as well as one's own. Common sense has always been willing to
study other persons besides our own selves, and that exactly as we study
single organs--viz., for what they are and do and for the conditions of
success and failure. Nor do we have to start necessarily from so-called
elements. Progress cannot be made merely out of details. It will not do
merely to pile up fragments and to expect the aggregates to form
themselves. It also takes a friend of facts with the capacity for
mustering and unifying them, as the general musters his army. Biology
had to have evolutionists and its Darwin to get on a broad basis to
start with, and human biology, the life of man, similarly had to be
conceived in a new spirit, with a clear recognition of the opportunities
for the study of detail about the brain and about the conditions for
its working and its proper support, but also with a clear vision of the
whole man and all that his happiness and efficiency depend upon.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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