EXPERIENCES OF A PSYCHIATRIST AS A MEMBER OF A SURGICAL FACULTY

The constant presence of a psychiatrist in a surgical faculty is a powerful motivating force per se, and his role in the eyes of the surgeons is of more importance than an active exchange of specific psychiatric information in the successful inception of a collaborative teaching program of this sort. Following such inception an increasing exchange of ideas will take place. The need for such an exchange between psychiatry and surgery is at least as great as is the need for correlative teaching in general.

Some observations of a psychiatrist attempting together with a surgical faculty to meet this need have been described. Our program is young, and there are usually several good ways of doing the same thing. For these reasons, and because of the wide variation in local conditions, we do not offer this report as a model which is necessarily applicable in other medical schools. We do hope, however, that there will be an increasing collaboration among psychiatrists and surgeons in the correlative teaching of surgery.