Welcome to PEP Web! Viewing the full text of this document requires a subscription to PEP Web. If you are coming in from a university from a registered IP address or secure referral page you should not need to log in. Contact your university librarian in the event of problems. If you have a personal subscription on your own account or through a Society or Institute please put your username and password in the box below. Any difficulties should be reported to your group administrator. Username: Password: Can't remember your username and/or password? If you have forgotten your username and/or password please click here and log in to the PaDS database. Once there you need to fill in your email address (this must be the email address that PEP has on record for you) and click "Send." Your username and password will be sent to this email address within a few minutes. If this does not work for you please contact your group organizer. Athens user? Login here. Not already a subscriber? Order a subscription today.

(1957). The International Psycho-Analytical Library, 52:144-164

XVIII. The Development of Psychological Medicine (1950)

John Rickman, M.D.

The half-century which this series of essays is designed to cover also spans the history of modern psychological medicine, which is also the history of a new skill. Every advance in medical science can be related to the development of skills—in clinical observation, in the design and use of apparatus of research, in the interpretation of data obtained by the use of the apparatus, and above all in conceptualizing the problem that is being faced. To this general rule the development of psychological medicine is no exception; but since the data differ so greatly from those of the physiologist and pathologist the means by which the facts are collected also are different. Both kinds of research are concerned with answers to the fundamental question, ‘What goes with what?’ If the data of the pathologist cannot be immediately linked with the data of the psycho-pathologist and psychiatrist, and vice versa, it simply means that ‘total medicine’ has not yet found a theory which combines the two.

This article does not touch on the development of psychiatry but tries only to outline some of the changes in thought and practice that have resulted from the study of the psychological problems which patients present to doctors for solution. To summarize in a short article the changes in the last fifty years would exhaust the general reader and weary the specialist, but a description of how it all arose from simple if subtle consulting-room work (without appliances of any kind whatever) and how the range of case-taking has been extended in penetration and in helpfulness to the patient may deserve a place in a story for doctors of doctors' work in this half-century of ferment and growth.

Doctors are not so confined as they were fifty years ago to the province of physical disease, and laymen are more ready to assume

—————————————

- 144 -

[This is a summary or excerpt from the full text of the book or article. The full text of the document is available to subscribers.]