William Osler and the New Psychiatry

  1. PAUL R. McHUGH, M.D.

    Abstract

    William Osler steered medical education towards knowledge of the natural history of disease and the biological sciences that explain its course and characteristic symptoms. A psychiatric education is now ready to move from a pre-Oslerian period, where the emphasis has been on teaching therapy, to a post-Oslerian discipline, where teaching focuses on distinctions in the presentation of psychiatric disorders and the basic sciences that can illuminate the causes and pathologic mechanisms behind abnormal human behaviors. Educational programs based on such ideas eliminate the denominationalism that has characterized psychiatry and make it more obviously a subdiscipline of medicine.

    Article and Author Information

    • ▸ From the Department of Psychiatry, The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine; Baltimore, Maryland.

    • ▸ Requests for reprints should be addressed to Paul R. McHugh, M.D.; The Johns Hopkins Hospital, Department of Psychiatry, 4-113 Meyer Building, 600 N. Wolfe Street; Baltimore, MD 21205.

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    This Article

    1. Ann Intern Med December 1, 1987 vol. 107 no. 6 914-918
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