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A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 by Various
page 21 of 163 (12%)

The great step was taken when all of life was seen again in its broad
relations, without any special theory but frankly as common sense finds
it, viz., as the activities and behavior of definite individuals--very
much as Aristotle had put it--"living organisms in their 'form' or
activity and behavior." Psychology had to wake up to studying other
minds as well as one's own. Common sense has always been willing to
study other persons besides our own selves, and that exactly as we study
single organs--viz., for what they are and do and for the conditions of
success and failure. Nor do we have to start necessarily from so-called
elements. Progress cannot be made merely out of details. It will not do
merely to pile up fragments and to expect the aggregates to form
themselves. It also takes a friend of facts with the capacity for
mustering and unifying them, as the general musters his army. Biology
had to have evolutionists and its Darwin to get on a broad basis to
start with, and human biology, the life of man, similarly had to be
conceived in a new spirit, with a clear recognition of the opportunities
for the study of detail about the brain and about the conditions for
its working and its proper support, but also with a clear vision of the
whole man and all that his happiness and efficiency depend upon.

All this evolution is strongly reflected in the actual work of
psychiatry and medicine. For a time, it looked to the physician as if
the physiology and pathology of the body had to make it their ambition
to make wholly unnecessary what traditional psychology had accumulated,
by turning it all into brain physiology. The "psychological" facts
involved were undoubtedly more difficult to control, so much so that one
tried to cut them out altogether. As if foreshadowing the later academic
"psychology without soul and consciousness," the venerable
Superintendent of Utica, Dr. Gray, was very proud when in 1870 he had
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