George Miller Beard, M.D. (1837-1883)

George Beard, M.D. (1837-1883)


George Beard is credited with coining the word "neurasthenia," a term that came into great prominence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Beard received his medical degree in 1866 at The College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York and then joined Dr. A. D. Rockwell, a New York neurologist who was using electricity in medical and surgical therapy and with whom Beard later published favorably received book on the subject. Beard became interested in psychology, and in 1876 he read a paper at a meeting of the American Neurological Association entitled, "On the influence of the mind on the cure and causation of disease" (Journal of Nervous & Mental Diseases, 1876, vol. 3, pp. 429-434). Beard credited emotions as influencing symptoms which could be dispelled by positive thinking, to which he applied the term "mental therapeutics." His paper met with derision from his colleagues, and The Superintendents’ Association lost no opportunity to disparage Beard’s writings. Beard’s book, A Practical Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia) (New York, 1880) received a scathing review in The AJI (April 1880, v. 36, pp. 522-526).

Historian Charles Rosenberg wrote, "Beard was neither a profound nor critical thinker. His popularization of the idea of neurasthenia won him an international reputation in the late 19th century… he was a forerunner of French and modern psychological medicine." ("The place of George M. Beard in 19th-century psychiatry," Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 1962, v. 36 (3), pp. 245-259).


Profile from: http://www.nim.nih.gov/hmd/diseases/note.html

From Wikipedia:
George Miller Beard (May 8, 1839 – January 23, 1883) was a U.S. neurologist who popularized the term neurasthenia, starting around 1869.


Biography:


Dr. Beard was born in Montville, Connecticut on May 8, 1839, [1837, according to the NIH profile, J. Richman] to Rev. Spencer F. Beard, a Congregational minister, and Lucy A. Leonard. He graduated from Yale College in 1862, and received his medical degree from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of New York in 1866. While still in medical school during the American Civil War, he served as an assistant surgeon in the West Gulf squadron of the United States Navy. After the war and graduation from medical school, he married Elizabeth Ann Alden, of Westville, Connecticut, on December 25, 1866.[1]


He is remembered best for having defined neurasthenia as a medical condition with symptoms of fatigue, anxiety, headache, impotence, neuralgia and depression, as a result of exhaustion of the central nervous system's energy reserves, which Beard attributed to civilization. Physicians who agreed with Beard associated neurasthenia with the stresses of urbanization and the increasingly competitive business environment. Stated simply, people were attempting to achieve more than their constitution could cope with. Typically this followed a short illness from which the patient was thought to have recovered.[2]


One of the more unusual disorders he studied from 1878 onwards was the exaggerated startle reflex among French-Canadian lumbermen from the Moosehead Lake region of Maine, that came to be known as the 'Jumpers of Maine'. If they were startled by a short verbal command, they would carry out the instruction without hesitation, irrespective of the consequences. The studies stimulated further research by the military and Georges Gilles de la Tourette.[3]


Beard was also involved extensively with electricity as a medical treatment, and published extensively on the subject. He was a champion of many reforms of psychiatry, and was a founder of the National Association for the Protection of the Insane and the Prevention of Insanity. He also took an unpopular stance against the death penalty for persons with mental illness, going so far as to campaign for leniency for Charles J. Guiteau, the assassin of President James Garfield on the basis that the man was not guilty because of insanity.[1]


He died on January 23, 1883 in New York City.[4]


[Other accounts say he died of pneumonia in his mid-forties, along with his wife who also died from the disease in their downtown New York City home which was also his office. Living before the age of anti-biotics, Beard was supposed to have tried electricity cures to treat their disease. Electrical medical devices to treat a range of diseases from cancer to cold were common in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Contrary to commonly held views on his work from his own period on to the present, I do not believe he was a "shallow" thinker. Quite to the contrary, his early death may have aborted a much more brillant career as a humanistic doctor of the science of mental disorders.
Beard had a profound effect on the thinking and writings of Sigmund Freud whose essay Civilization and its Discontents owes its core thesis to Beard and his associates view of the stresses of the business world we inhabit. Freud also converted the term neurasthenia to apply to other manifestations of neurotic behavior which his theories adumbrated.
He deserves a much higher place in American medical history. In the Race for the Republican nominee for the presidency, Newt Gingrich has declared his interest in funding a vigorous research program for treating disorders from neurosis to Alzheimers! Such a revolutionary declaration should put him first in the hearts of all those who have lost their loved ones to Alzheimer's disease and other mental disorders.
Interestingly, Jonathan Swift, who in the last 10 years of his life as Dean Swift at St. Patricks in Dublin perished from a number of severe mental disorders, which led one of  his lesser admirers, Dr. Samuel Johnson, in his long poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes, to observe, "See Swift expire a drivel'r and dumb show," ('dumb show,') His caretakers would charge money to show off the Dean in his decrepit condition, thus marking the ultimate irony of the life of Swift after his earlier literary victories over his political enemies, in Johnson's poem. J. Richman]


References1.Dictionary of American Biography Base Set. American Council of Learned Societies, 1928-1936.


2. A Handbook of Practical Treatment, John H. Musser, M.D. and O. A. Kelly, M.D., 1912.


3. Beard, George (1878). "Remarks upon 'jumpers or jumping Frenchmen'". The Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases 5: 526.


4. Almanac of Famous People, 8th ed. Gale Group, 2003.

Contact us: I am posting my book called "Running on Empty" on my Writers Anonymous blog. After I have posted the entire book, in about a year, I will be glad to review the scholarship on Dr. Beard and others included in my book for Wikipedia articles.
A follow up book could be, From George Miller Beard to President Newt Gingrich!
jordanp.richman@gmail.com