198 COHEN
Notes- Today the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS).
- And subsequently the NIH director from 1955-1968.
- Braceland occupied many important positions: Chief of the Navy’s
Neuropsychiatry Branch, President of the American Psychiatric Association,
Head of Psychiatry at the Mayo Foundation, and Medical Director of the
Hartford Retreat. - When I began residency training in September 1937, psychiatry was not a
widely accepted specialty. My 1935 class at the University of Chicago did
not have a single lecture in the subject. The American Board of Psychiatry
and Neurology, however, had just been established in 1936–many years
after such boards had been established in medicine, surgery, cardiology, obste
trics and gynecology, ophthalmology, and other specialties. It required
three years of residency training and two years of practice for eligibility to
take the examination. Harvard University, Yale University, Columbia
University, the University of Michigan and the University of Iowa had
residency programs in psychiatric institutes, as did some of the large private
mental hospitals and a number of state hospitals, but there was very little
research going on. Of the 1,889 members in the American Psychiatric
Association in 1936, only 157 were psychoanalysts. In 1937, there was only
one staff member at the Johns Hopkins University who had taken and
passed the board examination. By World War II, there could not have been
more than 3,000 psychiatrists (by 1967 there were almost 16,000, largely
the result of the NIMH’s financial support). - Kolb left the NIMH to join Braceland at the Mayo Clinic and from there
went to Columbia University to head the Psychiatry Department. - Their work, The Mental Hospital, was published in 1954. It received much
acclaim and led to Stanton’s subsequent appointments as Medical Director
of the McLean Hospital and Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard University,
and Schwartz’s appointment as Professor of Sociology at Brandeis University. - John Eberhart once said that part of his first job in the extramural program
was to persuade universities to set up training programs in clinical psychology,
using as an inducement the possibility of training grants and training stipends.
There were few such programs at the time, and although most were eager for
PHS subsidies, there was a good deal of reluctance in academic departments
to begin giving Ph.D.s in such a relatively undeveloped subfield. - We at the NIH were not to engage in private practice. The University of
Chicago at the time Mabel and I graduated was, I believe, the only full-time
medical school in the country. After Eberhart and I left, Frederick Goodwin
was able to obtain official permission for private practice.