Foundations of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry

To the Editor: Having spent a large part of my career working as a consultation-liaison psychiatrist, I was most interested to read Alison Heru’s review, published in the May 2018 issue of the Journal, of Don Lipsitt’s recent book, Foundations of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry: The Bumpy Road to Specialization. I noticed some important errors in the review, none of which are present in the book. Although Dr. Heru correctly attributes the first use of the term liaison psychiatry to Edward Billings in 1939, she is incorrect in stating that it was Flanders Dunbar who first coined the term psychosomatics. According to Prof. Walter Jackson Bate, it was the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge “who coined the term psychosomatic a century before it was adopted by the medical world” (1, p. 103). This was pointed out by John Nemiah (2) three decades ago and more recently by Peter Shoenberg, who noted that the poet “spoke about his ‘Psycho-somatic Ology’ in the course of a discussion of the origins and nature of the passions” (3, p. xi; 4, p. 1444). It is generally agreed, however, including by Lipsitt (5, pp. 98–99), that the term psychosomatic was introduced into the medical literature by Johann Christian August Heinroth, who was the first professor of psychiatry and psychotherapy in the Western world; he wrote about psychosomatic factors in insomnia in 1818, whereas Coleridge had used the term 7 years earlier (6).

Another error is the statement that Flanders Dunbar founded the journal Psychosomatics in 1939; she was actually one of the founding members and the first managing editor of the journal Psychosomatic Medicine, first published in 1939. As Lipsitt points out (5, p. 206), the journal Psychosomatics was founded in 1960 by Wilfrid Dorfman and has been the official journal of the Academy of Psychosomatic Medicine. A third error is the statement that Dunbar established the Society of Psychosomatics in 1942; it was the American Society for Research in Psychosomatic Problems that she helped establish (5, p. 102), and its name was changed in 1947 to the American Psychosomatic Society (7). Given that the Academy of Psychosomatic Medicine was recently renamed the Academy of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry, it is important that the history of psychosomatic medicine and the role of pioneers in the field be recorded accurately.