The Pullman Porter Looks at Life

As one surveys the progress of medicine and more particularly the coincident development of various specialties, one is impressed with the narrowness and more or less complete separation of one specialty from another as if each were dealing with only a portion and not the whole of human machinery. The separation is particularly striking in the instance of physical disease versus mental and psychic disease, and the appreciation that psychic factors play a definite rôle in the etiology of disease, is penetrating through the medical profession very slowly, and with a great deal of very obvious resistance. Yet after analyzing all of the juices that can readily be extracted from the patient, and after having X-rayed everything that can be made to cast a shadow, one cannot help but recognize that possibly back of it all there may be something the matter with the man himself. The human mind and human personality play as large a part as do the more physical of the biologic processes.

With respect to his position towards his patient and society, the psychopathologist appears often to occupy an exceptional position. Through his observations on the wards of the hospital and from his intimate talks with individual patients, he often has the unique opportunity of studying the workings of the human heart and mind, and the breadth and depth of the emotional life in its rich and infinite ramifications. But it would also appear that through the very fact of the nearness of the perspective he often loses sight of the human panorama as a whole and particularly fails to see the workings of the human mind as it comes in daily life in contact with other groups of people. It would, therefore, seem not inappropriate to take a kaleidoscopic view of life and see the forms of behavior that pass before one's vision.

It was my good fortune to spend the summer months over a period of years as a porter on Pullman cars throughout the United