2023-05-11 12:30:02
The book. How to tell the life of a great man without falling into hagiography? As old as biography, the question is often a puzzle. Especially when the audience you are addressing is not perfectly familiar with the hero in question. By tackling the figure of Thomas W. Salmon (1876-1927), as famous in the field of American psychiatry as he is unknown in France, the historian Sophie Delaporte has taken up this challenge.
Nothing seems to predispose the young man who left medical school in Albany, New York, in 1899 with a general practitioner’s degree to become this “ideal psychiatrist”, as he was often called. But tuberculosis quickly takes him away from the New York firm he has taken over. Appointed bacteriologist at the public hospital of Willard, with the mission of fighting diphtheria, he finds himself in an establishment welcoming two thousand insane. From then on, he was passionate about the condition of the “mad” and never ceased, wherever he went, to denounce the “terrible” fate reserved for them.
A eugenic position
This concern manifests itself first in the reception center for foreigners on Ellis Island. Thomas Salmon is in charge of the mental examination of new arrivals. Faced with the unprecedented wave of migration that the country is experiencing, he pleads for more rigorous control of entries, in order, he says, to “protecting the mental health of future Americans”. A clearly eugenic position that Sophie Delaporte reveals and analyzes. Certain sentences that she unearths, attributing for example to immigration the “sole responsibility for the insanity rate in the United States”, have enough to make you jump. But the same man also denounces the inadmissible conditions of reception, examination, treatment or dismissal, reserved for mentally ill immigrants. And he does not hesitate to disobey, which will lead to his dismissal.
His charm and his extraordinary capacity for conviction, he then put them at the service of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene. The institution intends to bring psychiatry out of the all-asylum and register it in the field of public health. Thomas Salmon works there tirelessly, thanks to a series of edifying investigations. Brilliant lecturer, tireless litigator, he will thus contribute to refound the discipline, to install it “in the medical field, but also within society as a whole”, emphasizes Sophie Delaporte.
An unfinished business. Died at sea in 1927, while suffering from an inoperable brain tumour, Thomas Salmon, who in the meantime had become professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, never ceased to regret the weakness of the transformations accomplished. There is one area, however, where his action has unquestionably had an impact: military psychiatry. Appointed head of the psychiatry department of the American expeditionary force in 1917, he took the opposite view of the English and the French, who saw in any soldier who suffered a nervous shock a potential simulator, even a traitor. For him, war neurosis is a “somatic symptom”, whose manifestations he studies, documents the magnitude and imposes early management in specialized units. He will then analyze, with extreme finesse, the nature of the “delayed mental disorder” veterans. We were not yet talking about post-traumatic stress. But under the leadership of a civilian general practitioner, American military psychiatry had begun to change.
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