Nearly everyone here, I imagine, has either been present at or has read the splendid Maudsley Lecture delivered in 1958 by Professor Leo Kanner (1). In this Lecture Kanner reviewed the various interests, or, as he called them, the loosely scattered segments which by their eventual convergence and fusion resulted in the emergence, between thirty and forty years ago, of child psychiatry. He caused them to pass before our eyes in a vivid and colourful procession—psychiatry, mental deficiency, education, criminology, psychology, psycho-analysis, the child guidance clinics, with paediatrics given a place of its own, though not allowed to march in the procession itself. Now, I have been asked to take up one or two of these segments for closer examination, and give some account of their contents and development during the pre-historic period before they began to converge towards their final synthesis. In so far as I am able to do this, my account will be merely factual; I must leave it to you who are engaged in this field of work to assess the relevance of the material which I am presenting.
Four circumstances—in addition to my own limitations as a historian—have determined my choice of subject for this evening. Last November this Institute celebrated its Jubilee—that is, the 50th anniversary of the recognition of the Maudsley Hospital as a School of the University of London. In the following month the one-time Medico-Psychological Association, which owed its very name to a suggestion by Henry Maudsley, and has now developed into the Royal College of Psychiatrists, moved into its new headquarters in Belgrave Square. Since then we have had to mourn the death of Sir Aubrey Lewis, one of whose outstanding contributions to the Association, and to psychiatric history, was his Maudsley Lecture of 1951, devoted to the work and influence of Henry Maudsley.† Moreover, the early ‘70s are the centenary years of Maudsley's period of office as the senior editor of the Journal of Mental Science, now the British Journal of Psychiatry, with which I myself have long been associated. So it seemed that it might be appropriate for me to tell you something about the history of the Association, about Maudsley's relations with it, and about the various ideas, proposals and actions which eventually led to the foundation of this Hospital and Institute. In doing this I hope to furnish a few footnotes, as it were, to Sir Aubrey's Maudsley and Mapother Lectures, and these will be my personal tribute to one whom so many of us have held in affectionate admiration.
More than'2,OOO years ago, in .the time of Hippocrates, a few types o f mental diseases were classified; these were mania, dementia and melancholia. Little advance, if any, was noted till Willis, in the seventeenth century, and Haslam, towards the eighteenth century, laid the foundations for a much wider classification.It was not till the end of the eighteenth century that some cases of speech and other muscular defects were found to be associated with insanity.Tuke, in 1892, based his classifications on the divisions of the motor, sensory and ideational centres, and also made classifications easier by enumerating all disorders associated wlth known organic conltions.More1 and Pritchard, in 1860, were the first to describe hertltary, toxic, idiopathic and moral insanity, also sympathetic, impulsive and the insanity of the degenerate.Skoe classified his patients accordmg to the type of physical disorder causrng mental disturbance, such as gout and tuberculosis.It was Clouston who added a few more to these, including anaama and labetes.Causes are classified under the following groups :-Toxic.-Alcohol ; drug habit, morpha, cocaine, etc. ; lead and other such poisons ; tuberculosis, influenza, puerperal sepsis ; other specific fevers ; syphilis acqwred ; syphilis congenital ; other toxins.Traumatic.-Injuries, operations, sunstroke. Diseases of the Nervous System.-Lesions of the brain ; lesions of the spinal cord and nerves; epilepsy; other defined neuroses, limited to hysteria, chorea, neurasthenia, spasmolc asthma ; other neuroses which occurred in infancy or childhood limited to convulsions and night terrors.
I should like to congratulate the Council of the Section on their decision to devote an evening to a historical subject. I cannot, I fear, congratulate them on their choice of a speaker, for I have done no more than scratch the surface of a very obvious period in the history of psychiatry. However, any sort of historical paper must be better than none, for as far as I have been able to ascertain no such paper has ever been read in this Section, with the exception of the Presidential Address delivered by the late Dr. Hubert Norman. Until a few months ago, exactly the same was true of the Section of the History of Medicine, but in recent months we have had two welcome and refreshing papers by Dr. Burns and Dr. Zelmanowits. We have had, too, the brilliant Maudsley Lectures by Prof. Lewis and Dr. Rees Thomas. Perhaps we may take it that these are signs of a renewed interest in the history of our specialty. I am sure that no branch of medicine needs it more.
Im Rahmen vergleichender Untersuchungen iiber die Eigenschaften von Antipyryl-(4)-und Indolyl-(3)-derivaten beschaftigten wir uns mit der Frage der Reduzierbarkeit von Indolyl-(3)-methyl-keton und seinen basischen Derivaten. In der Antipyrinreihe ist es anscheinend so, daB zwar Antipyryl-(4)-alkyl-ketone sich nicht zu den entsprechenden Alkoholen hydrieren lassen, dalj diese Hydrierung aber dann moglich ist, wenn im Alkylrest ein basischer Substituent steht. nber diese Untersuchungen sol1 spater berichtet werden. Schon friiher batten wir festgestelltl), daB die genannten Indolyl-alkyl-ketone sich nicht in normaler Weise zu den Alkoholen hydrieren lassen. Es ist bereits bekannt, daB auch Indolyl-(3)-aldehyd katalytisch nicht hydrierbar ist2). Um die Rage zu untersuchen, ob solche Alkohole iiberhaupt bestandig sind, versuchten wir, sie durch Grignard-Reaktion aus Indolyl-(3)-aldehyd darzustellen. Dabei ergab sich, da13 solche Alkohole anscheinend nur dann bestandig sind, wenn das benachbarte Kohlenstoffatom quartar ist. So konnte aus Indolyl-(3)-aldehyd und tert. Butyl-magnesium-chlorid der Alkohol I in farblosen *) Herrn Professor Dr. K . Kindler zum 70. Geburtstsg yewidmet. 1) Ansgwr Walk, Diplomarbeit Technische Hochschule Rarlsruhe 1958. 2, E . Leete und L. Harion, Caned. J. Chem. 31, 775 (1953).
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