Other IMG Presidents of APA

As an APA member and international medical graduate (IMG), I read with sincere gratitude the article in the August 16 issue about the role played by IMGs in American psychiatry, in particular at APA. As an amateur historian, however, I was disappointed by the somewhat restricted focus on recent decades.

IMGs have played a major role in American psychiatry far longer than indicated in the article. Adolf Meyer, the most influential psychiatrist in the first half of the 20th century, also an APA president (1927), received his medical degree from the University of Zurich in 1892. Upon arriving in the United States, Adolf Meyer taught neurology at the University of Chicago and then served as a pathologist in several mental hospitals in Illinois, Massachusetts, and New York. He went on to teach psychiatry at Cornell until 1909, when he became the inaugural chair of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins. From his post at Hopkins, Meyer developed his theory of mental disorders as reactions and insisted on seeing the entire patient as part of his “psychobiological orientation.” That language permeated the first edition of DSM in 1952.

Another IMG who also served as APA president was Charles Macfie Campbell (1936), who received his M.D. from the University of Edinburgh—incidentally, the same institution where Benjamin Rush, considered to be the father of American psychiatry, completed medical school. ■

ERICK MESSIAS, M.D., PH.D., M.P.H.

Little Rock, Ark.