By Edward C. Leonard, Jr., MD, DLFAPA
On January 11, 1909, the Philadelphia Psychiatric Society organized to create a forum for discussing papers on mental disorders four times a year. Twenty-seven physicians met at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia on the northeast corner of Thirteenth and Locust Streets to start our society. Academic founders included its prime organizer and first president, Charles W. Burr, professor of mental diseases at the University of Pennsylvania, and Francis X. Dercum, its third president, who was professor of nervous and mental diseases at Jefferson Medical College.
William W. Richardson, head of the men’s section of Norristown State Hospital, and Albert R. Moulton, a leader of the private Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane, became Vice Presidents. Moulton became the second president of the new society. William W. Hawke, Chief Resident Physician of the Philadelphia Hospital for the Insane, became Secretary-Treasurer. William H. Hancker, Superintendent of the Delaware State Hospital, and John Kearsley Mitchell, a son of S. Weir Mitchell, became Councilors. J. K. Mitchell was First Vice President of the American Neurological Association in 1909 (his father was President), a year after Charles Burr had been its President.
A local newspaper reported that the new organization’s object was to study “mental physiology and pathology,” while a subsequent announcement said it was to study “the advancement of Psychiatry.” The Philadelphia Neurological Society, organized 25 years earlier, included women and men as did the American Psychiatric Association, which had six women members from Pennsylvania in 1908. Thus it was not a surprise that Mary M. Wolfe, independent head of the women’s section of Norristown State Hospital, was among the psychiatric society founders. By 1912 five women were listed among at least 47 members.
The Philadelphia society followed the development of several regional societies whose missions encouraged local practitioners to discuss clinical topics. Annual meetings of the American Psychiatric Association provided a limited role for the increasing number of physicians at mental hospitals and in office practice. Years later Charles Burr recalled that Albert C. Buckley, a young Friends Hospital physician, urged him to start “the movement to have a society which would confine its attention to disorders of the mind.” He remembered some opposition, for “a few of the members of the already established Neurological Society wanted us to be content to be permitted to take charge of the program of one or two meetings of that society yearly.”
For 15 years, the society’s scientific meetings were held at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Early lectures were serious and included “Insanity in Families,” “Symbolism as Shown in Insane Art,” “The Feeling of Unreality,” “The Development of Pellagra,” and “Some Remarks Concerning the Noguchi Modification of the Wasserman Reaction.”
Our founder, Charles Burr, later mentioned that, after a talk, many of the attendees walked the half-block to the old Hotel Rittenhouse bar for a few beers. Anyone might have wanted to relax after hearing a “Preliminary Report of the Inhibition of Hemolysis by Cobra Venom in Dementia Praecox and Pulmonary Tuberculosis.”
In 1935 (at age 74), Charles Burr reflected on Philadelphia psychiatry: “as an old man thinks his young self saw it.” He noted that 50 years before, “the word ‘psychiatrist’ had not yet come into use, and ‘asylum’ is now obsolete.” He identified “the introduction of arsenicals administered intravenously” as “the most striking [therapeutic] step forward” in the preceding half-century. He concluded that for the future of psychiatry “the main hope lies in biochemistry.”
In 1944, then president Harold D. Palmer, M.D., noted that the society had 131 members, 29 of whom were serving in the military. He was proud that minutes of meetings were published in the Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry.
Having adapted to changing times, the Philadelphia Psychiatric Society thrives today. It operated as an independent academic organization until 1974, its 65th year. Then it affiliated with the Pennsylvania District Branch of the American Psychiatric Association, founded 35 years before as the Pennsylvania Psychiatric Society. Today its 950 members practice, teach, and research in Philadelphia, Bucks, Chester, Montgomery, and Delaware counties. Its scientific meetings are well attended, while government’s role in psychiatric practice is monitored carefully.