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Mentally ill. Until the 20th century, the mentally ill were thought to be possessed by evil spirits. In Hieronymus Bosch’s 1480 painting “The Extraction of the Stone of Madness,” a healer is removing a tulip—a Dutch metaphor for mental disorder—from a sufferer’s head.
Adolf Meyer. In 1907, Hopkins psychiatrist Adolf Meyer received a manuscript from a former mental patient named Clifford Beers. A Mind That Found Itself was a devastating account of Beers’s two years in mental institutions. The men began a collaboration that would change the way Americans thought of mental illness. Not just a personal tragedy to be treated in private, it was a public health issue with causes and consequences that went far beyond the individual. On February 19, 1909, Beers and Meyer led the founding gathering of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene; other members included School founder William Welch and psychologist William James. Trained in neuroanatomy and neurophysiology, Meyer emphasized the need for “socially oriented psychiatry” that encouraged psychiatrists to join with teachers, ministers, and others to promote mental health.
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Triage. Faster, better triage makes a more effective ER. In 1974, epidemiologist 