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

"Adventures in Neurasthenia," from Running on Empty, an unpublished ms, by Jordan Richman

Shell shock, neurasthenia and war neurosis

Two Official British figures claim that 80,000 cases of shell shock passed through the various medical facilities during WW1 but many cases were covered up by sending psychiatric cases to ordinary hospitals and the true figure could be approximately 200,000 cases. German records recorded a figure of 613,047 cases of nervous disorders between 1913-1918.


'Neurasthenia' was a term used by an American neurologist, George Beard, M.D. in 1869. He described patients as neurasthenic when they were depressed and inert. 'War neurosis' was described as nervous exhaustion through overwork and the Weir Mitchell Cure was applied - isolation, rest and a diet rich in milk-based foods.

The term 'shell shock' was first used in the public domain by Charles Samuel Meyers, a Cambridge psychologist, in an article he wrote about the cases he had been treating. He felt uncomfortable about using the term because it did not describe the mental conditions that these men were suffering.

Shell shock was literally the shock felt by a soldier near to an exploding shell and the feelings of having one's senses assaulted by the detonation flash, heat, displacement of the air and the ground tremors as the shell formed a crater in the earth.

By the mid-nineteenth century in America, fatigue, viewed as a nervous disorder brought about by the brain work or the professional classes, rather than the physical work of the working classes, received sympathetic treatment from the American and European medical profession.

Fatigue, bordering on exhaustion, was seen as a central focus of a cluster of nervous conditions. These conditions were named by the neurologist George Beard in 1869 as neurasthenia. 

Neurologists worked with Civil War soldiers who suffered from battle fatigue and other nervous conditions brought on by the war. These physicians eagerly accepted the term as one that differentiated insanity from neurosis.

Even earlier at the beginning of the nineteenth century, an English physician, Thomas Trotter, in A View of the Nervous Temperament (1807), had identified the nervous disorders of mental workers as the chief medical problem of the new century, surpassing fever, which he believed had been more common in the previous century. 

The Overworked American, A Warning from 2000

4.0 out of 5 stars Trouble In Our Worker's Paradise!, June 28, 2000



By Barron Laycock "Labradorman" (Temple, New Hampshire United States) - See all my reviews


(TOP 50 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME) This review is from: The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline Of Leisure (Paperback)


America is the fabled land of plenty, and according to Juliet Schor, most of us seem to be lining up for more than our share of work hours. In our unabated obsession to get more than our fair share of the virtual cornucopia of goods and services out there in the marketplace, we seem to have become collectively addicted to working more and more hours in a devil's bargain with our employers. This book is a wonderful overview of this long-term trend toward overwork, where the average American now works the equivalent of an extra month a year.

Since it is cheaper to pay someone overtime than it is to hire new workers and pay the associated benefits, corporations gladly ante up to pay for our increasing presence at work. Yet this mysterious and unexpected contemporary American addiction to being on the job has its associated costs (as well as causes).


Harvard professor Juliet Schor spins a convincing and disturbing tale regarding the increasing numbers of hours we spend each week at work rather than leisure. This is a historical surprise, since most baby boomers emerged from the colleges and universities convinced we would have more leisure time and better ways to pursue our many avocational interests than any generation in the past. In this entertaining, topical, and quite readable book, the author surveys a plethora of reasons for the surprising trend toward overwork.

The principal dynamic she pinpoints in influencing this trend is an economy that literally demands extra effort and time from its employees, an economy which until quite recently had a chronic shortage of available jobs and "surplus" labor pool of potential workers.

Under such circumstances, anyone lacking the requisite willingness to work extra hours was indeed dispensable. Thus one becomes a careerist in an effort to survive.

She also details how our culturally conditioned goal-oriented attitude toward time as a resource to be used effectively and efficiently rather than as a precious resource to be used to increase the quality of our own lives plays into the situation.

For Schor, we are on a treadmill, if not to oblivion, then to an impoverished cultural life where we are what we do occupationally rather than what we do and what we become in our leisure hours pursuing our avocations and our personal lives with family and friends.

This is an important and path breaking book, one that we should find especially relevant given the fact that many of the jobs we are so seemingly addicted to will soon fade away in the new markets and new economies of the so-called "Third Wave".

Anyone who has experienced "downsizing" at the hands of a large and impersonal corporation can tell you how quickly all those sacrifices and long hours are disregarded and forgotten by your employer. The emotional and economic impacts of such events can be devastating to the individual and his or her family. As a friend said to me recently, anyone who is what they do really isn't very much at all. Read and heed.

 

Elite Runners of 2011 New York City Marathon (NY Times photo)

Paula Radcliffe of Britain, appropriately front and center even at the start, won the women's New York City Marathon nine months after giving birth. She finished in 2 hours 23 minutes 9 seconds, far slower than her world record of 2:15.25.

Running on Empty

In the 1990s, tired and overworked Americans were losing confidence about moving toward a better life in spite of their intense and passionate dedication to the work ethic. They were "running on empty" because they felt overworked and tired.