Come take a trip down memory lane, back to January 11, 1909, in
Philadelphia, some 208 years after the city officially was born. That day,
Charles Burr, M.D., a professor of mental diseases at the University of
Pennsylvania, summoned 27 medical doctors—all doctors of diseases of the
mind—to form the Philadelphia Psychiatric Society (PPS).
FIG1
A few "city named" psychiatric societies are older: New York
(1903) and Detroit (1908), said Edward Leonard Jr., M.D., who included these
facts in his article "The Founding of the Philadelphia Psychiatric
Society," which appeared in the spring PPS
newsletter.
Leonard, a former president of PPS, created a mixed-media PPS history
lesson presented to members in January to kick off the society's centennial
(see Psychiatric Society Celebrates Rich—and Long—History).
Viewers are told the following and more:
• Francis Dercum, M.D., a professor of nervous and mental diseases at the
city's Jefferson Medical College, was among the physicians present at the
birth of PPS. At the time he owned and ran Dercum's Private Hospital for
Nervous Diseases.
• The founding meeting of PPS took place in a building that was serving as
home to the College of Physicians but constructed in the 1860s to house the
Mutter Museum, world renowned today for its anatomical and pathological
specimens.
• Burr credits Albert Buckley, M.D., with the idea of establishing a
psychiatric society in the city. Buckley was a young physician at Friends
Hospital, the first private psychiatric hospital in the country. It was
established in 1813 by Quakers as the Asylum for the Relief of Persons
Deprived of the Use of Their Reason. Buckley later became its
superintendent.
• Periencephalitis, pituitary tumor, and puerperal septic delirium were among
the topics discussed at PPS's earliest meetings. The subject matter shifted
over the years with the presentation of such papers as "Insanity in
Families," "What Has Psychology Given to Medicine?" and the"
Statistical Study of Alcoholism as a Causative Factor in
Insanity."
• Henry Cotton, M.D., the superintendent of New Jersey's State Hospital for
the Insane in Trenton, reported in 1920 to have cured 62 insane patients by
extracting their teeth. The theory was strongly shot down by Burr and Charles
Mills, M.D., founder of the Philadelphia Neurological Society. Mills simply
reasoned "that the teeth of Europeans are notoriously bad when compared
to the teeth of Americans, yet the rate of insanity in Europe is no higher
than in this country." ▪