A Psychiatric Milestone: Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921
History
A Psychiatric Milestone: Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921
Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane; Mental illness
(2) The organization of our general education is very defective since it
fails to make clear to each student man's place in the universe and any
orderly view of the world and man; it fails adequately to enlighten the
student regarding the processes of life as adaptations of organisms to
their environment, man, himself, being such an organism reacting
physically and psychically to his surroundings in ways either favorable
or unfavorable to his own preservation and that of his species; it fails
to teach the student that the human organism represents a bundle of
instincts each with its knowing, its feeling, and its striving
component, that what we call "knowledge" and what we call "character"
are gradual developments in each person, and that if we know how they
have developed in a particular person we possess clues to the way that
person will react under a given stimulus, that is to say, what he will
think, how he will feel, and how he will act; and it fails, again,
properly to instruct students regarding the interrelationships of
members of different social groups (familial, civic, economic,
occupational, ethical, national, racial, etc.); in other words, our
general educational organization is as yet far from successful in
inculcating philosophical, biological, psychological, and sociological
conceptions that are adequate symbols of reality.
(3) Though our medical schools have made phenomenal advances in the
organization and equipment of their institutes and in provision for
teaching and research in a large number of preclinical and clinical
sciences, they have up to now almost wholly ignored normal psychology,
psychiatry, and mental hygiene. The majority of the professors in these
schools are so absorbed by the morphological, physical, and chemical
aspects of their subjects, that students rarely get from them any
inkling of the psychobiological aspect, any adequate knowledge of human
motives, or any satisfactory data regarding human behavior, normal or
abnormal.[6] It is only recently and only in a few schools that
psychiatric clinics have been established as parts of the teaching
hospitals, that medical students have been able to come into direct
contact over an appreciable period of time with the objects of
psychiatric study, that the psychic manifestations of patients have
received any direct and particular attention in the general medical and
surgical wards, and that there has been any free and constant reciprocal
exchange of thought and opinion between students of the somatic on the
one hand and students of the psychic on the other.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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