Stanley Cobb

Stanley Cobb (December 10, 1887–1968) was a neurologist and could be considered "the founder of biological psychiatry in the United States".ref|Shorter1988

Cobb's childhood and education were affected by his stammer, which it is suggested led him to study the neurosciences in an attempt to understand its cause. He married Elizabeth Mason Almy in 1915.ref|White1984Abridged

Cobb studied at and later went on to work for the Harvard Medical School. In 1925 he was named Harvard's Bullard Professor of Neuropathology.

In 1922, Cobb was asked to discover why patients with epilepsy had improved when they were starved. He recruited William Lennox as an assistant. The ketogenic diet had been proposed as being as effective as starvation, and so Cobb and Lennox investigated it.ref|Shorvon2004

In 1930, he was appointed director of the newly opened Harvard Neurological Unit at Boston City Hospital. When Cobb moved to the Massachusetts General Hospital in 1934, he was succeeded by Tracey Putnam. Cobb built the department of psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He championed psychoanalysis, giving it respectability when others in that conservative hospital disapproved. He published an annual review of neuropsychiatry in the "Archive of Internal Medicine" from 1935 to 1959.

When Carl Jung was invited in 1936 to receive an honorary degree by Harvard, he stayed with Cobb. Jung "put his shoes outside his bedroom door to have them shined. Cobb polished them".ref|Kaufmann1992

When he retired in 1954, Cobb directed his interest towards the study of avian neurology. He was passionately opposed to the widespread spraying of DDT. After his favourite pond was sprayed, he was angered to write "Death of a Salt Pond," a difficult task, since he was virtually blind by then. This was first published in a local paper but interest gathered and it achieved widespread circulation after being republished in the Audubon Magazine in May, 1963.

:"It is enough immortality for me if I may become even a very small part of advancing wisdom, hoping that I have done my bit to make the world a better place." — Stanley Cobb.

Mind and Body

Throughout his professional career, Cobb was troubled by the attempts of medical scientists to draw hard-and-fast distinctions between "mental" and "physical" symptoms, between "psychic" and "somatic" causes, between "functional" and "organic" diseases, and even between "psychology" and "physiology". He wrote:

I solve the mind-body problem by stating that "there is no such problem". There are, of course, plenty of problems concerning the "mind", and the "body", and all intermediate levels of integration of the nervous system. What I wish to emphasize is that there is no problem of "mind" "versus" "body", because biologically no such dichotomy can be made. The dichotomy is an artefact; there is no truth in it, and the discussion has no place in science in 1943...

The difference between psychology and physiology is merely one of complexity. The simpler bodily processes are studied in physiological departments; the more complex ones that entail the highest levels of neural integration are studied in psychological departments. There is no biological significance to this division; it is simply an administrative affair, so the the university president will know what salary goes to which professor. — Stanley Cobb, "Borderlands of Psychiatry", pp.19–21.

Footnotes

#cite book
title = A History of Psychiatry : From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac
first = Edward
last = Shorter
year = 1998
month = March
publisher = Wiley
pages = 263
id = ISBN 0-471-24531-3
# cite web
author = Benjamin V. White
url = http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/unitarians/cobb.html
title = Stanley Cobb: Neurologist and Psychiatrist
work = Notable American Unitarians
accessdate = 2006-02-23
#cite book
title = Freud, Adler, and Jung (Discovering the Mind, Volume 3)
first = Walter Arnold
last = Kaufmann
year = 1992
month = June
publisher = Transaction Publishers
pages = 427
id = ISBN 0-88738-395-5
#cite book
last = S. D. Shorvon (ed)
coauthors = David R. Fish (ed), Emilio Perucca (ed), W. Edwin Dodson (ed)
title = The Treatment of Epilepsy
year = 2004
month = March
publisher = Blackwell
pages = xx–xxii
id = ISBN 0-632-06046-8

Further reading

* cite book
title = Stanley Cobb, A Builder of the Modern Neurosciences
first = Benjamin V.
last = White
month = January
year = 1984
publisher = University Press of Virginia
id = ISBN 0-8139-1057-9
* cite journal
author=Kubie LS
title=Stanley Cobb, M.D. 1887-1968
journal=Psychosom Med
year=1969
pages=97–106
volume=31
issue=2
pmid= 4891206
* cite book
first = Stanley
last = Cobb
title = Borderlands of psychiatry
publisher = Harvard University Press
month = January
year = 1943
* cite book
first = Stanley
last = Cobb
title = Foundations of Neuropsychiatry
publisher = Williams & Wilkins
month = January
year = 1952
id = OCLC|536824