Psychiatry in American Medical Education: The Case of Harvard's Medical School, 1900-1945.

As American psychiatrists moved from the asylum to the private clinic during the early twentieth century, psychiatry acquired a growing presence within medical school curricula. This shift in disciplinary status took place at a time when medical education itself was experiencing a period of reform. By examining medical school registers at Harvard University, records from the Dean's office of Harvard's medical school, and oral histories, this paper examines the rise in prominence of psychiatry in medical education. Three builders of Harvard psychiatry - Elmer E. Southard, C. Macfie Campbell, and Harry C. Solomon - simultaneously sought to mark territory for psychiatry and its relevance. In doing so, they capitalized on three related elements: the fluidity that existed between psychiatry and neurology, the new venues whereby medical students gained training in psychiatry, and the broader role of patrons, professional associations, and certification boards, which sought to expand psychiatry's influence in the social and cultural life of twentieth-century America.

Between the Mind Twist and the Brain Spot. The Material Dimensions of Psychopathology in the Work of Elmer Ernest Southard .

This paper explores the material and visual practices that defined studies of psychopathology in early twentieth-century American medicine, through a close look at the work of neuropathologist Elmer E. Southard (1876­1920). As a discipline sitting at the intersection between laboratory and clinical practice, neuropathology has received little attention from historians of the brain sciences. Unlike the neurologist, who was interested in treating patients and saving lives, the neuropathologist often encountered patients following death, and studied the brain for signs of pathology during autopsy. Trained in a German tradition of laboratory pathology, Southard has been cast as a somaticist with respect to psychopathology. By examining Southard's medical and philosophical writings, I present a more nuanced analysis of the role of brain pathology in Southard's vision of disease etiology, his views on the foundations of psychiatry, as well as a more vivid picture of the sorts of material practices that defined the work of the neuropathologist.

Transcending disciplines: Scientific styles in studies of the brain in mid-twentieth century America.

Much scholarship in the history of cybernetics has focused on the far-reaching cultural dimensions of the movement. What has garnered less attention are efforts by cyberneticians such as Warren McCulloch and Norbert Wiener to transform scientific practice in an array of disciplines in the biomedical sciences, and the complex ways these efforts were received by members of traditional disciplines. In a quest for scientific unity that had a decidedly imperialistic flavour, cyberneticians sought to apply practices common in the exact sciences-mainly theoretical modeling-to problems in disciplines that were traditionally defined by highly empirical practices, such as neurophysiology and neuroanatomy. Their efforts were met with mixed, often critical responses. This paper attempts to make sense of such dynamics by exploring the notion of a scientific style and its usefulness in accounting for the contrasts in scientific practice in brain research and in cybernetics during the 1940s. Focusing on two key institutional contexts of brain research and the role of the Rockefeller and Macy Foundations in directing brain research and cybernetics, the paper argues that the conflicts between these fields were not simply about experiment vs. theory but turned more closely on the questions that defined each area and the language used to elaborate answers.

Integrating mind and brain: Warren S. McCulloch, cerebral localization, and experimental epistemology.

Recently, historians have focused on Warren S. McCulloch's role in the cybernetics movement during the 1940s and 1950s, and his contributions to the development of computer science and communication theory. What has received less attention is McCulloch's early work in neurophysiology, and its relationship to his philosophical quest for an 'experimental epistemology' - a physiological theory of knowledge. McCulloch's early laboratory work during the 1930s addressed the problem of cerebral localization: localizing aspects of behaviour in the cerebral cortex of the brain. Most of this research was done with the Dutch neurophysiologist J.G. Dusser de Barenne at Yale University. The connection between McCulloch's philosophical interests and his experimental work can be expressed as a search for a physiological a priori, an integrated mechanism of sensation.

(Physio)logical circuits: the intellectual origins of the McCulloch-Pitts neural networks.

This article examines the intellectual and institutional factors that contributed to the collaboration of neuropsychiatrist Warren McCulloch and mathematician Walter Pitts on the logic of neural networks, which culminated in their 1943 publication, "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity." Historians and scientists alike often refer to the McCulloch-Pitts paper as a landmark event in the history of cybernetics, and fundamental to the development of cognitive science and artificial intelligence. This article seeks to bring some historical context to the McCulloch-Pitts collaboration itself, namely, their intellectual and scientific orientations and backgrounds, the key concepts that contributed to their paper, and the institutional context in which their collaboration was made. Although they were almost a generation apart and had dissimilar scientific backgrounds, McCulloch and Pitts had similar intellectual concerns, simultaneously motivated by issues in philosophy, neurology, and mathematics. This article demonstrates how these issues converged and found resonance in their model of neural networks. By examining the intellectual backgrounds of McCulloch and Pitts as individuals, it will be shown that besides being an important event in the history of cybernetics proper, the McCulloch-Pitts collaboration was an important result of early twentieth-century efforts to apply mathematics to neurological phenomena.