John C. Burnham’s research while affiliated with The Ohio State University and other places

The concept of the sick role entered sociology in 1951 when Talcott Parsons creatively separated the sick person out of the doctor-patient dyad. The idea became fundamental in the subdiscipline of medical sociology. By the 1990s, the concept had almost disappeared from the research literature. Beyond the generational and theoretical changes that explain how the sick role idea could become irrelevant or unnecessary to sociologists, there were two immediate factors: the negative politicization of the concept and the shift of medical sociologists to a focus on applied health behavior. In the later, fragmented discipline of sociology, final, total abandonment was still uncertain.

The concept of the sick role was introduced into sociology in 1951 and was widely used in medical sociology. A sick person at that time would assume a special social role that permitted him or her to deviate from his or her normal social roles. Historians came to utilise the idea of the sick role as well. It was useful to describe social behaviour and expectations for the mid-century period and centuries before, but at the end of the twentieth century, the actualities of illness and medicine made the concept less applicable to that recent time period. The fact that this standard concept no longer applied signalled the advent of a new epoch in the history of medicine around the turn of the twenty-first century.

YoungJames Harvey, Pure food: securing the Federal Food and Drugs Act of 1906, Princeton University Press, 1989, 8vo, pp. xiii, 312, $29.95. - Volume 35 Issue 3 - John C. Burnham

BartripP. W. J., Mirror of medicine: a history of the BMJ, London, British Medical Journal and Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990, 8vo, pp. xiv, 338, illus., £35.00. - Volume 35 Issue 3 - John C. Burnham

From 1920 to 1923, the preeminent American anthropologist, Alfred L. Kroeber (1876–1960) of the University of California, Berkeley, conducted an active practice as a lay psychoanalyst, with an office in San Francisco. His own published account of his psychoanalytic work appeared incidentally in introductory material in a collection of his papers that appeared in 1952. He was defending his authority to speak about the place of Freud’s thinking in anthropology: “I have undergone at least a brief control psychoanalysis; and from 1920 to 1923 I practiced psychoanalysis in San Francisco, part of the time under medical sponsorship in the neuropsychiatric clinic of a hospital, part of the time independently.” (Kroeber, 1952, p. 300) This incident has not made sense to biographers. As one of the major shapers of the discipline of anthropology, Kroeber did not utilize Freud’s teachings in any obvious and major way. The architects of the culture and personality school, who were contemporaries of Kroeber, in contrast, for example, employed psychoanalytic thinking in a profound way. They formed a perhaps dominant school that involved many anthropologists as well as psychoanalysts and psychologists in the middle decades of the twentieth century.1 In what follows, I use printed records, including biographical materials published by the family,2 the now-printed correspondence of Kroeber with his close friend, Edward Sapir, documents from the Bancroft Library Kroeber Papers (from which very personal material was removed before it was deposited), and some personal material in the Elsie Clews Parsons biographies.3 To these sources I now add, for the first time, notes from an interview with Kroeber in his home in 1955. My purpose is to explore some of what actually happened and, more importantly, the significance of the incident.4 How did Kroeber come to practice psychoanalysis? And why did his work in psychoanalysis not transform his anthropology? I find the answer in the operation of Kroeber’s sense of disciplinarity. My evidence therefore turns this biographical inquiry into one that explores how Freud’s ideas spread in the early years. Kroeber did open his office in the summer of 1920, after the end of the academic year 1918–1919. He continued at the same time to serve as a full-time faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was head of the Department of Anthropology. The official records show that he did not take leave between the second half of the 1917–1918 academic year and the second semester of 1923–1924.5 At some point, according to Theodora Kroeber, his second wife and biographer, he began doing some psychoanalyses at the Stanford medical school clinic in San Francisco, a facility that served the poor. According to Kroeber himself, in the interview, when he had determined that he wanted to try to practice psychoanalysis, he knew that he first needed experience. He therefore looked for a free clinic where he could take any patient referred to him. His friends advised him to avoid the University of California clinic, where the relevant specialist was a pure neurologist and antagonistic to a psychological approach. At the Stanford medical school, then located in San Francisco, however, the head was a brain surgeon but was “a good man.” Kroeber approached this surgeon, who said he didn’t know anything about it and needed to read up. He did, and he took Kroeber on. The neurosurgeon himself did not believe in psychoanalysis, Kroeber explained, but he had an open mind (A. L. Kroeber, personal interview, June 15, 1955).6 The head of the Stanford neurological clinic was in fact a neurologist doing spinal fluid studies, which could indeed have given the impression of doing surgery. His name was Henry G. Mehrtens (1885–1933), and he was also publishing at that time on infectious diseases of the nervous system.7 Kroeber went to the Stanford clinic three afternoons a week and was fed a range of patients. They included a wide variety of cases, and Kroeber learned a great deal from them. Colleagues at the clinic were nice to him, and he was called into staff meetings to discuss patients. All of this went...

Communication amongst medical specialists helps display the tensions between localism and transnationalisation. Some quantitative sampling of psychiatric journals provides one framework for understanding the history of psychiatry and, to some extent, the history of medicine in general in the twentieth century. After World War II, extreme national isolation of psychiatric communities gave way to substantial transnationalisation, especially in the 1980s, when a remarkable switch to English-language communication became obvious. Various psychiatric communities used the new universal language, not so much as victims of Americanisation, as to gain general professional recognition and to participate in and adapt to modernisation.

In the World War I period, psychologists in Britain and Germany independently and simultaneously originated the idea of accident proneness (Unfallneigung). This distinctive syndrome of suffering a series of accidents was logically attractive for psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, especially as a pattern of unconsciously motivated deviant and self-destructive behaviour. Yet except for some mid-twentieth-century interest by psychosomatics specialists, psychiatrists did not systematically embrace the syndrome except occasionally as a symptom of other psychiatric conditions, thus showing that there were limits to the extent to which twentieth-century psychiatrists would medicalize patterns of behaviour.