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On my functioning bookshelf there is the well-marked and -thumbed 1939 edition of Kurt Goldstein's The Organism. It has, over the years, entered the texture of my work, and in so doing, it has made me a plagiarist. In his introduction to this new edition, Oliver Sacks calls Goldstein “one of the most forgotten figures in the history of psychiatry.” If I have contributed to that it is because his views have become incorporated so intimately into my own work and teaching that I have failed to quote or footnote him. This is often what happens with good teachers, as with fathers and mothers.
With its reissue almost 60 years after its first publication in English, another generation is offered the opportunity to learn from a great teacher, and this review allows a grateful learner to finally credit that teacher.
Goldstein is important not only in the history of psychiatry and in its fellow field of mental studies and therapy, neurology. His way of investigating and working has importance for the field of medicine as well. The reissue of this book has particular value at this time of important change in medical practice. The revolution brought about through managed-care delivery systems will have enormous effects on the philosophy of medical education. Ironically, the emphasis on providing care to a whole population may mean that, in focusing on the diseases, the person who is ill is lost. As a physician and researcher Kurt Goldstein always maintained his focus on the person who is ill, as did the men who made American medicine preeminent in therapeutics and research—William Osler, Francis Peabody, and William Halstead.
In reviewing this book and especially its reissue, it is necessary to emphasize its source and first appearance. Goldstein's work came out of the war-wracked minds and brains of German soldiers injured in the first man-made mass death of our century—World War I. In his Institute for Research into the Consequences of Brain Injuries founded in 1916 in Frankfurt