_The Chairman_:--The Johns Hopkins Medical School lends us also to-day
Dr. Lewellys F. Barker, its Professor of Clinical Medicine. Dr. Barker
has done so much to define and settle the contradictions of mind and
matter, and has clarified so much, and in fields so varied, as teacher,
research worker, and practitioner, that we welcome this opportunity of
listening to his discussion of "THE IMPORTANCE OF PSYCHIATRY IN GENERAL
MEDICAL PRACTICE."

DR. BARKER

We have met to-day to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the
founding of a hospital that, in its simpler beginnings and in its
evolution to the complex and highly organized activities of the present,
has served an eminently practical purpose and has played an important
role in the development of the science and art of psychiatry in America.
I desire, as a representative of general medicine, and, especially, of
internal medicine, to add, on this occasion, my congratulations to those
of the spokesmen of other groups, and, at the same time to express the
hope that this institution, historically so significant for the century
just past, may maintain its relative influence and reputation in the
centuries to come.

The interest taken in psychiatry by the general practitioner and by the
consulting internist has been growing rapidly of late. Some of the
reasons for this growth of interest and heightening of appreciation I
have drawn attention to on an earlier occasion.[4] Psychiatry as a whole
was for a long time as widely separated from general medicine as
penology is to-day, and for similar reasons. It was a long time before
persons that manifested extraordinary abnormalities of thought, feeling,
and behavior were regarded as deserving medical study and care, and even
when a humanitarian movement led to their transfer from
straight-jackets, chains, and prison cells to "asylums for the insane,"
these institutions were, for practical reasons, so divorced from the
homes of the people and from general hospitals that psychiatry had, and
could at the time have, but little intercourse with general medicine or
with general society. Mental disorders were moral and legal problems
rather than biological, social, and medical problems. Their genesis was
wholly misunderstood, and legal, medical, social, religious, and
philosophic prejudices went far toward preventing any rational
scientific mode of approach to the questions involved or any formulation
of investigative procedures