General Virology

"Should I just reminisce?" So wondered Dr. M. Ralph Kaufman, an elderly participant in the April 1973 conference after which this book is titled (p. 347). The number and quality of some of the historical papers presented surprised him and he wondered how formal or spontaneous his own contribution should be. Kaufman's puzzlement-recollections or research-reveals the tension of the conference and, consequently, of the book. As in any conference, some papers are good, some are bad. Here, though, it would be inaccurate to claim that the research papers are automatically better than the personal accounts. Nathan Hale's treatment of Putnam and neurology in Boston is excellent, as is David Shakow's account of the contributions made by the Worcester State Hospital. Daniel Aaron's "Boston at the Turn of the Century" is disappointingly sketchy. An essay by Julius Silberger on Mary Baker Eddy is included. But since Christian Science has been rather unfriendly to Freud, perhaps the symposium should have included a report on the Mind Cure movement. Prevalent in New England since the Civil War, it predisposed the populace, at least as patients if not as physicians, to variant forms of psychotherapy. The symposium's planners hoped that their work would be provocative rather than definitive. The number of questions which the various papers raise more than justifies this goal. For example, exactly what was the outreach of Elwood Worester's Emmanuel Movement? Or perhaps more important today, what issues of patient rights and human experimentation are brought up by Milton Greenblatt's account of research at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital? Wagner-Jauregg's fever therapy is now passe, but one still wonders about the administration of sukudo (rat-bite fever) for paresis in light of today's concerns. Finally, that historian or psychiatrist already familiar with the subject might profit more from the book's recollections than the merely curious. At times, the listing of psychiatrists or social workers with little note of their overall importance gives a feeling of "clubbiness" to the uninitiated. Yet for any serious student of this period in the development of psychoanalysis in America these essays are essential. The overall result is a mean between telling it as it actually was and the way we were.